The  International 

Theological  Library 


EDITORS'  PREFACE 

THEOLOGY  has  made  great  and  rapid  advances 
in  recent  years.  New  lines  of  investigation  have 
been  opened  up,  fresh  light  has  been  cast  upon 
many  subjects  of  the  deepest  interest,  and  the  historical 
method  has  been  applied  with  important  results.  This 
has  prepared  the  way  for  a  Library  of  Theological 
Science,  and  has  created  the  demand  for  it.  It  has  also 
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ments of  Theology,  and  to  associate  them  in  an  enter- 
prise which  will  furnish  a  record  of  Theological 
inquiry  up  to  date. 

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carefully  planned  whole.  One  of  the  Editors  is  to  pre- 
pare a  volume  of  Theological  Encyclopaedia  which  will 
give  the  history  and  literature  of  each  department,  as 
well  as  of  Theology  as  a  whole. 


The  International  Theological  Library 

The  Library  is  intended  to  form  a  series  of  Text 
Books  for  Students  of  Theology. 

The  Authors,  therefore,  aim  at  conciseness  and  com- 
pactness of  statement.  At  the  same  time,  they  have  in 
view  that  large  and  increasing  class  of  students,  in  other 
departments  of  inquiry,  who  desire  to  have  a  systematic 
and  thorough  exposition  of  Theological  Science.  Tech- 
nical matters  will  therefore  be  thrown  into  the  form  of 
notes,  and  the  text  will  be  made  as  readable  and  attract- 
ive as  possible. 

The  Library  is  international  and  interconfessional.  It 
will  be  conducted  in  a  catholic  spirit,  and  in  the 
interests  of  Theology  as  a  science. 

Its  aim  will  be  to  give  full  and  impartial  statements 
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The  Authors  will  be  scholars  of  recognized  reputation 
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will  be  associated  with  each  other  and  with  the  Editors 
in  the  effort  to  provide  a  series  of  volumes  which  may 
adequately  represent  the  present  condition  of  investi- 
gation, and  indicate  the  way  for  further  progress. 

Charles  A.  Briggs 
Stewart  D.  F.  Salmond 


TlIK    IXTERNATIONAT.    TlIK(  )I.O(  ;IC  Al,    T.ir.KAKV 


ARRANGEMENT  OF  VOLUMES  AND  AUTHORS 

THEOLOGICAL  ENCYCLOPAEDIA.  By  Charles  A.  BriGGS,  D.D., 
D.Litt.,  Professor  of  Theological  Encyclopaedia  and  Symbolics,  Union 
Theological  Seminary,  New  York. 

AN  INTRODUCTION  TO  THE  LITERATURE  OF  THE  OLD  TESTA- 
MENT.  By  S.  R.  Driver,  D.D.,  D.Litt.,  Regius  Professor  of  Hebrew 
and  Canon  of  Christ  Church,  Oxford.  [Revised  and  Enlarged  Edition. 

CANON  AND  TEXT  OF  THE  OLD  TESTAMENT.  By  the  Rev.  JOHN 
Skinner,  D.D.,  Principal  and  Professor  of  Old  Testament  Language  and  Lit- 
erature, College  of  the  Presbyterian  Church  of  England,  Cambridge,  England, 
and  the  Rev.  Owen  Whitehouse,  B.A.,  Principal  and  Professor  of  Hebrew, 
Chestnut  College,  Cambridge,  England. 

OLD  TESTAMENT  HISTORY.  By  Henry  Preserved  Smith,  D.D., 
Professor  of  Old  Testament  Literature,  Meadville,  Pa.  [Now  Ready. 

CONTEMPORARY      HISTORY      OF     THE     OLD     TESTAMENT.       By 

Francis  Brown,  D.D.,  LL.D.,  D.Litt.,  President  and  Professor  of 
Hebrew,  Union  Theological  Seminary,  New  York. 

THEOLOGY  OF  THE    OLD    TESTAMENT.      By  A.  B.  Davidson,  D.D., 

LL.D.,  sometime  Professor  of  Hebrew,  New  College,  Edinburgh. 

[Now  Ready. 

AN  INTRODUCTION  TO  THE  LITERATURE  OF  THE  NEW  TESTA- 
MENT.  By  Rev.  James  Moffatt,  B.D.,  Minister  United  Free  Church, 
Broughty  Ferry,  Scotland.  [Now  Ready. 

CANON  AND  TEXT  OF  THE  NEW  TESTAMENT.  By  Caspar  Rene 
Gregory,  D.D.,  LL.D.,  Professor  of  New  Testament  Exegesis  in  the 
University  of  Leipzig.  ^jVoui  Ready. 

THE  LIFE  OF  CHRIST.  By  Wii.MAM  Sanday',  D.D.,  LL.D.,  Lady 
Margaret  Professor  of  Divinity  and  Canon  of  Christ  Church,  Oxford. 

A    HISTORY    OF  CHRISTIANITY    IN    THE    APOSTOLIC    AGE.      By 

Arthur  C  McGikfert,  D.D.,  Professor  of  Church  History,  Union  Theo- 
logical   Seminary,  New  York.  \_No'm  Ready. 

CONTEMPORARY     HISTORY     OF    THE     NEW    TESTAMENT.      By 

Frank  C.  Porter,  D.D.,  Professor  of  Biblical  Theology,  Yale  University, 
New  Haven,   Conn. 

THEOLOGY  OF  THE  NEW  TESTAMENT.  By  George  B.  Stevens, 
D.D.,  sometime  Professor  of  Systematic  Theology,  Yale  University,  New 
Haven,  Conn.  {^No-lV  Ready. 

BIBLICAL  ARCH>EOLOGY.  By  G.  Buchanan  Gray,  D.D.,  Professor 
of   Hebrew,  Mansfield  College,  Oxford. 

THE  ANCIENT  CATHOLIC  CHURCH.  By  Robert  Rainey,  D.D. , 
LL.D.,  sometime  Principal  of  New  College,  Edinburgh.  [Now  Ready. 

THE  LATIN  CHURCH  FROM  GREGORY  THE  GREAT  TO  THE 
COUNCIL  OF  TRENT.  lAuihor  to  be  atviounced  laler 


The  International  Theological  Library 


THE  GREEK  AND  EASTERN  CHURCHES.  By  W.  F.  Adeney,  D.D., 
Principal  of  Independent  College,  Manchester.  [Now  Ready. 

THE  REFORMATION.  By  T.  M.  LiNDSAY,  D.D.,  Principal  of  the  United 
Free  College,  Glasgow.  [2  vols.     Now  Ready. 

CHRISTIANITY  IN  LATIN  COUNTRIES  SINCE  THE  COUNCIL  OF 
TRENT.    By  PAUL  Sabatier,  D.Lilt.,  Drome,  France. 

SYMBOLICS.  By  Charles  A.  Briggs,  D.D.,  D.Litt.,  Professor  of 
Theological  Encyclopaedia  and  Symbolics,  Union  Theological  Seminary, 
New  York. 

HISTORY  OF  CHRISTIAN  DOCTRINE.  By  G.  P.  FiSHER,  D.D., 
LL.D.,  sometime  Professor  of  Ecclesiastical  History,  Yale  University, 
New  Haven,  Conn.  [Revised  and  Enlarged  Edition. 

CHRISTIAN  INSTITUTIONS.  By  A.  V.  G.  Allen,  D.D.,  sometime 
Professor  of  Ecclesiastical  History,  Protestant  Episcopal  Divinity  School, 
Cambridge,  ISIass.  [Now  Ready. 

PHILOSOPHY  OF  RELIGION.  By  George  Gallaway,  D.D.,  Minister 
of  United  Free  Church,  Castle  Douglas,  Scotland. 

THE  HISTORY  OF  RELIGIONS.    By  George  F.  Moore,  D.D.,  LL.D., 

Professor  in  Harvard  University. 

APOLOGETICS.  By  A.  B.  Bruce,  D.D.,  sometime  Professor  of  New 
Testament  Exegesis,  Free  Church  College,  Glasgow. 

[Revised  and  Enlarged  Edition. 

THE  CHRISTIAN  DOCTRINE  OF  GOD.  By  William  N.  Clarke,  D.  D., 
Professor  of  Systematic  Theology,  Hamilton  Theological  Seminary. 

[Now  Ready. 

THE  DOCTRINE  OF  MAN.   By  William  P.  Paterson,  D.D.,  Professor 

of  Divinity,  University  of  Edinburgh. 

THE  DOCTRINE  OF  THE  PERSON  OF  JESUS  CHRIST.  By  H.  R. 

Mackintosh,  Ph.D.,  D.D.,  Professor  of  Theology,  New  College,  Edinburgh. 

[Now  Ready. 

THE  CHRISTIAN  DOCTRINE  OF  SALVATION.  By  George  B.  Ste- 
vens, D.D.,  sometime  Professor  of  Systematic  Theology,  Yale  University. 

[Now  Ready. 

THE  DOCTRINE  OF  THE  CHRISTIAN  LIFE.  By  William  Adams 
Brown,  D.D.,  Professor  cf  Systematic  Theology,  Union  Theological 
Seminary,  New  York. 

CHRISTIAN  ETHICS.  By  Newman  Smyth,  D.D.,  Pastor  of  Congrega- 
tional  Church,  New  Haven.  [Revised  and  Enlarged  Edition, 

THE   CHRISTIAN    PASTOR    AND  THE    WORKING    CHURCH.      By 

Washington  Gi,ai>DEN,  D.D.,  Pastor  of  Congregational  Church,  Columbus, 
Ohio.  [A^ffw  Ready. 

THE  CHRISTIAN  PREACHER.  By  A.  E.  Garvie,  D.D.,  Principal  of 
New  College,  London,  England. 

CF°  OTHER   volumes   WILL   BE    ANNOUNCED   LATER. 


ITbc  3ntcrnational  ^bcolooical  OLibrarv. 


EDITED    BY 

CHARLES    A.    BRIGGS,   D.D.,   D.Litt., 

Graduate  Professir  of  Theological  Encyclopiedia  and  Symbolics,  Union   Theological 
Seminary,  New  York; 


The  late  STEWART  D.  F.  SALMOND,  D.D., 

Principal,  and  Professor  of  Systematic  Theology  and  New  Testament  E-xegesis, 
United  Free  Church  College,  Aberdeen. 


THE  DOCTRINE  OF  THE  PERSON  OF  JESUS  CHRIST. 
By   H.    R.    MACKINTOSH,    D  Phil.,   D.D. 


International    Theological    Library 


THE  DOCTRINE 


OF    THE 


PERSON  OF  JESUS  CHRIST 


H.   R   MACKINTOSH,   DTiiil.,  D.D. 

fROFESSOR   Oy  THEOLOGT,    NEW   COLLEGE 
KDIKBL'KaH 


NEW  YORK 

CHARLES    SCRIBNER'S    SONS 
1912 


/V3 


TO   THE    MEMORY   OF 

(tUarcus  ©obs 

I   INSCRIBE   THIS    BOOK 


304050 


PREFACE. 

It  may  not  be  unnecessary  to  inform  the  reader  that  the 
pieseut  book  is  designed  chiefly  as  a  student's  manual, 
which,  with  a  fair  measure  of  completeness,  should  cover 
the  whole  field  of  Christology.  This  so  far  excuses  two 
of  its  more  prominent  features :  the  large  space  giN'eu  to 
historical  narration,  and  a  certain  frequency  of  allusion  to 
modern  literature.  My  purpose  was  not  simply  to  formu- 
late the  results  reached  by  a  single  mind — results,  as  I 
give  fair  warning,  in  no  sense  original  or  extraordinary — 
but  also  to  furnish  what  might  be  considered  a  competent 
guide  to  the  best  recent  discussion,  in  this  country  and 
Germany.  If  these  pages  should  have  helped  any  student 
to  take  his  bearings  in  the  world  of  Christological  thought, 
or  suggested  fruitful  lines  of  new  inquiry,  their  object  will 
have  been  fully  achieved. 

Nothing  in  the  book,  it  is  probable,  may  seem  so  inde- 
fensible as  the  more  or  less  speculative  tone  of  the  con- 
cluding chapters.  Some,  I  fear,  will  judge  that,  all  pro- 
testations notwithstanding,  I  have  added  one  more  to  the 
vain  attempts  to  explain  in  detail  how  God  became,  for  our 
redemption,  incarnate  in  the  person  of  Jesus  Christ.  I 
am  conscious  that  a  problem  of  method  is  indicated  here 
on  which  opinions  are  widely  divergent,  and  are  likely  to 
remain  so.  To  abstain  from  all  efforts  to  reach  a  con- 
structive synthesis  of  the  data  which  faith  apprehends  would, 
as  is  known,  have  been  in  harmony  with  well-marked  and 
ably  championed  tendencies  of  our  time.  I  can  only  plead 
that,  while  it  certainly  "  has  not  pleased  God   to  save  His 


viii  PREFACE 

people  by  argument,"  it  nevertheless  does  not  seem  possible 
to  hold  or  vindicate  the  absoluteness  of  Christ  as  an  intel- 
ligent conviction  except  by  passing  definitely  into  the 
domain  of  reasoned  theory.  It  is  not  thtit  Dogmatic  starts 
where  faith  ends.  It  is  rather  that  Dogmatic  is  called  to 
fix  in  lucid  conceptual  forms  the  whole  rich  truth  of 
which  faith  is  sure.  The  revelation  and  self-sacrifice  of 
God  in  Christ — which  forms  the  very  heart  of  the  New 
Testament  message — cannot  really  be  presented  to  the 
mind  without  raising  problems  of  an  essentially  speculative 
character.  Hence  there  will  always  be  metaphysic  in 
theology,  but  it  is  the  implicit  metaphysic  of  faith,  moving 
ever  witliin  the  sphere  of  conscience. 

My  sincere  thanks  are  due  to  my  friend  and  colleague, 
the  Kev.  Professor  H.  A.  A.  Kennedy,  D.D.,  who  has  helped 
me  to  revise  the  proofs,  and  has  guided  me  at  many  points 
by  valuable  counsel  and  suggestion.  I  am  also  indebted  to 
the  Editor  of  the  Expositor  for  permission  to  use  some 
portions  of  an  article  lately  contributed  to  its  pages. 


H.  R.  MACKINTOSH. 


New  College,  Edini;ui;gh, 
Uh  June  1912. 


CONTENTS. 


BOOK   I. 
CHRISTOLOGY  IN  THE  NEW  TESTAMENT. 

INTRODUCTION. 

Main  types  of  apostolic  thought,  1.  Motives  leading  to  Christ- 
ology,  2. 

CHAPTER  I. 

PAGB 

Christ  in  the  Synoptic  Gospels  .....      5-35 
The  Synoptics  as  Gospels,  not  biographies,  5.     The  human  portrait 

of  Jesus,  9.     Messiahship  of  Jesus,  14.     Son  of  man,  19.     Son  of 

God,  25.  The  personal  authority  of  Jesus,  31. 
Note  on  the  Sinlessness  of  Jesus,  35-39. 

CHAPTER  II. 

Primitive  Christian  Belief        .....      39-48 
Early  speeches  in  Acts,  39.     First  Epistle  of  Peter,  44. 

CHAPTER  III. 

The  Chkistology  of  St.  Paul  .....  49-77 
Genesis  of  tlie  Pauline  Christology,  50.  The  glorified  Lord,  52. 
Christ  and  the  Spirit,  57.  The  historic  Christ,  62.  The  Son  of  God, 
65.  Pre-existence,  66.  Cosmic  activity  of  Clirist,  69.  Subordina- 
tion of  Christ  to  God,  71.  Advance  of  Paulinism  on  Drimitive 
Christian  belief,  74. 

CHAPTER   IV. 

Chkistology  in  the  Epistle  to  the  Hebrews  .  .       78-87 

Christ  as  High  Priest,  78.  The  human  Jesus,  79.  Sonship  of 
Christ,  80.  Pre-existence,  83.  Subordinatfon,  84.  Comparison  with 
Pauline  view,  86. 


X  CONTENTS 

CHAPTER  V. 

PAGE 

Christology  in  the  Apocalypse  ....      88-93 

Messianic  symbolism,  88.     Heavenly  glory  of  Jesus,  89.     Relation 
of  Christ  to  God,  90. 

CHAPTER   VI. 

The  Johannine  Christology      .....      94-121 
Messianic  interest,  94.     Christological   design,  95.     Humanity  of 
Jesus,  99.     Son  of  God,  102.     Pre-existence,  103.     The  risen  glory, 
106.     Son  of  man,  108.     Christ-mysticism,  110.     Simple  modalism, 
112.     Teaching  of  the  Prologue,  115.     First  Epistle  of  John,  120. 


BOOK   II. 
HISTORY   OF   CHRISTOLOGICAL   DOCTRINE. 

CHAPTER  I. 

Christology  in  the  Sub-Apostolio  Age         .  .  .       122-139 

Introduction,  122.  The  Apostolic  Fathers,  127.  Ignatius,  129. 
Gnostic  Christology,  134.     The  Apostles'  Creed,  136. 

CHAPTER   II. 

Beginnings  of  the  Chrlstological  Dogma   .  .  .       140-158 

The  Greek  iipologists,  140.  Irenaeus,  144,  Monarchianism,  147. 
Sabellius,  151.     Tertullian,  154. 

CHAPTER   III. 

The  Ascendancy  of  the  Logos  Doctrine     .  .  .       159-174 

Neo-Platonism,  159.  The  Alexandrian  Theologians  :  Clement,  161. 
Origen,  164.  Correspondence  of  the  Dionysii,  170.  Paul  of  Samosata, 
171. 

CHAPTER  IV. 

The  Arian  Controversy  .....      175-195 

The  heresy  of  Arius,  175.  The  Nicene  Creed,  179.  Athanasius, 
183.  Marcellus  of  Ancyra,  189.  Movements  of  Semi- Arianism,  191. 
The  Cajipadocian  Divines,  192. 

CHAPTER  V. 

Controversies  as  to  the  full  Humanity  of  Christ         .       196-222 
Apollinarianism,   196.     Nestorianism,  201.     Cyril  of  Alexandria, 
205.     Eutychianism,  209.     Dogmatic  Epistle  of  Leo,  211.     Council 
and    Creed    of    Chalcedon,    212.      Monophysite    Controversy,    215. 
Monothelite  Controversy,  219.     John  of  Damascus,  222. 


CONTENTS  XI 

CHAPTER  VI. 

PAGK 

Later  Ciiristolooy  in  the  West        ....      223-229 
Augustine,  223.     Siiani.sh  Adoptianism,  225.     Middle  Ages,  226. 
Tlionias  Aquinas,  228.    Duns  Scotus,  229. 

CHAPTER   VII. 

Christology  of  the  Reformation  Churches  .  .      230-246 

Luther,  230.  Christology  of  the  Lutheran  Church,  237.  Reformed 
Christology,  242.     Soeinianisni,  245. 

CHAPTER   VIII. 

Christology  in  the  Nineteenth  Century  .  .  ,        247-284 

Theocentric  and  Anthropocentric  Interpretations,  247.  Schleier- 
macher,  250.  Hegel  and  his  School,  256.  Kenotic  Theories,  264. 
Dorner,  272.  Christology  in  Britain  and  America,  275.  Ritschl  and 
the  Ritschlians,  278.     Modern  Radical  School,  281. 


BOOK  in. 

THE   RECONSTRUCTIVE   STATEMENT   OF 
THE   DOCTRINE. 

PART  L 
PRELIM  IN  A  BY   Q  VEST  IONS. 

CHAPTER  I. 

The  Intellectual  Keed  for  a  Christology  .  .      285-305 

What  Christianity  is,  285.  Objections  to  Christology,  2S6.  Jesus 
as  hero  or  genius,  287.  Literal  fidelity  to  Chalcedon  impossible,  292. 
The  doctrine  of  Two  Natures,  294.  The  reconstruction  of  Christology, 
299.     Metaphysics  in  Christology,  302. 

CHAPTER  n. 

Christology  and  the  Historic  Christ  .  .  .      306-320 

.Jesus  the  point  of  departure,  306.  History  and  the  Gospel,  307. 
Herrmann's  view  of  the  historic  Christ,  315.     The  risen  Lord,  317. 

CHAPTER   in. 

Christ's  Person  in  Relation  to  His  Work  .  .  .      321-344 

Christ  known  through  His  sa\-ing  influence,  321.  His  ethical 
supremacy,  325.  His  work  of  Atonement,  329.  Union  with  Christ, 
333.  His  revelation  of  the  Father,  340.  His  work  illumined  by  His 
person,  341. 


XU  CONTENTS 

PART  II. 
THE  IMMEDIATE   UTTERANCES  OF  FAITH. 

CHAPTER  IV. 

PAGE 

Christ  the  Object  of  Faith  .....  345-362 
The  simplest  starting-point,  345.  Faith  in  Christ  and  faith  in  God, 
345.  Such  faith  central  in  New  Testament,  349.  Faith  to  be  inter- 
rogated at  its  highest  stage,  353.  Jesus  as  merely  Subject  of  faith, 
353.  History  and  an  Alisolnte  personality,  355.  Forgiveness  medi- 
ated through  Jesus,  357.     "Jesus-religion,"  359. 

CHAPTER   V. 

The  Exalted  Lord        ......      363-382 

The  Christ  of  faith  a  transcendent  Person,  363.  Did  His  influence 
cease  at  death  ?  367.  The  resurrection  a  point  of  transition,  369. 
Christ  as  Giver  of  the  Spirit,  373.  His  intercession,  376.  Mysticism, 
378.     Sovereignty  of  Christ,  379. 

CHAPTER  VI. 

The  Perfect  Manhood  of  Christ       ....      383-406 
Docetism,  383.     Jesus  an  individual  man,  385.     Yet  universal,  391. 
Integrity  of  Christ's  manhood,  394.     Its  sinless  quality,  400.     Sig- 
nificance of  His  humanity  for  faith,  404. 

CHAPTER   VII. 

The  Divinity  of  Christ  .....      407-426 

Modes  of  approach,  407.  Giving  Christ  the  right  predicate,  410. 
Godhead  the  ultimate  ground  of  His  sinlessness,  412.  Of  His  unshared 
Sonship,  415.  Of  His  risen  Life,  418.  Is  "Godhead"  the  riglit 
word  ?  419.     The  incarnation  as  core  of  the  Gospel,  424. 


PART  in. 

THE   TRANSCENDENT  IMPLICATES  OF  FAITH. 

CHAPTER  VIII. 

The  Christian  Idea  of  Incarnation  ....      427-444 
The  transcendent  problems  of  Christ's  person,  427.     Ethnic  beliefs 
in    incarnation,    428.      Incarnation    and    Divine   immanence,    431. 
Absolute  immanence  of  God  in  Christ,  434.     Incarnation  and  evolu- 
tion, 437.     Incarnation  remedial  in  purjiose,  440. 

CHAPTER  IX. 

The  Preexistence  of  the  Son  ....      445-462 

Pre-existence  an  inferential  conception,  445.     Objection  to  it  on 


CONTENTS  XI 11 

PAOK 

grounds  of  history,  440.  O'ljcption  on  grounds  of  tlioory,  450.  Ideal 
lire-existence,  454.  Difficulties  of  conception  as  a  whole,  457.  Its 
religious  value,  458. 

CHAPTER   X. 

The  Self-Limitation  of  God  in  Christ         .  ,  .      463-486 

Recent  Kenotic  thought,  463.  The  basal  princiiile  or  idea,  466. 
Data  of  problem,  469.  Moralisation  of  categories,  472.  Analogies  in 
human  life,  474.  Transposition  of  attributes,  477.  The  self-reduced 
Life  in  history,  479.  Limits  of  the  present  discussion,  482.  Criticism 
made  by  Ritschl,  485. 

Note  on  Dr.  Sanday's  Psychological  Theory  .  «  .       487-490 

CHAPTER   XL 

The  Self-Realisation  of  Christ        ....      491-507 
Development  in   the  Incarnate   person,   49L     Stages   in  Christ's 
development,  493.     Objections  considered,  496.     Mutual  approach  of 
God  and  man  in  history,  499.     Moral  correlaiionof  Divine  self-limita- 
tion and  self-fulfilment,  504.     The  charge  of  inconceivability,  505. 

CHAPTER   XII. 

Christ  and  the  Divine  Tiuunity  ....  508-526 
Christianity  a  new  form  of  monotheism,  508.  Experimental  idea 
of  the  Trinity  in  New  Testament,  509.  Economic  view  of  the  Trinity, 
512.  An  immanent  construction  permissible,  515.  Objection  that 
this  is  to  think  God  in  abstraction,  515.  Objection  that  the  world  is 
God's  other,  519.  Objection  that  an  iutra-diviue  duality  means 
ditheism,  523.     Conclusion,  526. 

Appendix,  Jesus'  Birth  of  a  Virgin  •  i  .      527-534 

INDEX     .,.....#  635 


ABBREVIATIONS. 

DCQ.        .        .     'Rasivag&^  Dictionary  of  Christ  and  the  GosikIs  {\^0&-\^Q9)). 

DG. .         .         ,     Dogmengcschichte. 

EOT.       .        .     Expositors  Greek  Testament  (ed.  Sir  W.  R.  NicoU,  1897- 
1910), 

HDB.      .        .     Ha-sixng^' DidioiMry  of  the  Bible  (WdS-l^^ii). 

RE. ,         ,         .     Real-Encydo2)adie  filr  jirotest.   Theologie  u,  Kirche'^  (ed. 
Hauck,  1896-1909). 

ZTK.       .        .     Zeitschrift  filr  Theologie  und  Kirche. 


THE   PERSON   OF  JESUS  CHRIST. 

BOOK  I. 

CHRISTOLOGY   IN   THE    NEW 
TESTAMENT. 

INTRODUCTION. 

It  may  be  well  to  state  clearly  that  in  the  sketch  of  New 
TestanieDt  Christology  which  follows,  I  have  advisedly 
made  no  attempt  to  expound  the  numerous  minor  phases 
of  opinion.  On  the  contrary,  my  range  has  been  confined 
somewhat  severely  to  the  main  types  of  apostolic  doctrine. 
These,  we  may  compute,  are  six  in  number :  the  Synoptic, 
the  primitive  (which  here  includes  1  Peter),  the  Pauline, 
the  types  represented  by  the  Epistle  to  the  Hebrews  and 
the  Apocalypse,  and  the  Johannine.  It  is  not  assumed 
that  all  six  types  are  totally  independent  of  each  other, 
but  only  that  in  a  broad  way  they  are  capable  of  being 
distinguished.  By  the  Synoptic  type,  in  the  enumeration 
just  given,  is  denoted  the  mind  of  Jesus  Himself  as  it  may 
be  gathered  from  the  Synoptic  Gospels ;  with  this  explana- 
tion, the  order  of  types  may  be  taken  also  as  approximately 

LiTERATUKE  ou  the  New  Testament  Christology  as  a  whole — The  text- 
books on  New  Testament  Theology  by  Baur,  Feine,  Holtzmanii,  Schlatter, 
Stevens,  Weinel,  and  B.  Weiss  ;  Beyschlag,  Die  Chrtstologie  des  Neiien 
Teda'inents,  1866  ;  Denney,  Jesus  and  the  Gospd,  1908  ;  Granbery,  Outline 
of  New  Tesfament  Christolof/y,  1909  ;  Shailer  Mathews,  The  Messianic  Hope 
in  the  Ncio  Testament,  1905  ;  J.  Weiss,  Chridus,  die  Anfdnge  des  Dogmas, 
1909  (Eng.  tr.  1911)  ;  Clemen,  Religionsgeschichtliche  Erkldning  des 
Neuen  Testaments,  1909. 

I 


2  TdE    PEUoON    OF   JESUS    CHRIST 

cbronological.  Nothing  has  been  said  about  Christology 
in  Deutero-Paulinism  or  in  the  less  prominent  Catholic 
Epistles  (James,  Jude,  2  Peter).  These  are  of  course 
matters  which  demand  to  be  carefully  investigated  in 
their  own  time  and  place,  but  the  aims  of  the  present 
treatise,  I  felt,  would  be  best  attained  by  keeping  to  the 
main  stream  of  Christological  statement  and  reflection. 

That  there  is  a  main  stream,  that  the  authors  of  the 
New  Testament  are  eventually  one  in  their  view  of  Christ, 
with  a  unity  which  is  powerful  enough  to  absorb  and 
subdue  their  differences  of  interpretation,  is  not  indeed 
to  be  lightheartedly  assumed.  But  it  is  rendered  ex- 
tremely probable  by  the  simple  experimental  fact  that 
the  Church  has  always  found  it  possible  to  nourish  her 
faith  in  the  Eedeemer  from  every  part  of  the  apostolic 
writings.  Further,  this  natural  presumption  is  vindicated 
by  a  closer  scrutiny  of  the  facts.  Two  certainties  are 
shared  in  common  by  all  New  Testament  writers :  First, 
that  the  life  and  consciousness  of  Jesus  was  in  form  com- 
pletely human ;  second,  that  this  historic  life,  apprehended 
as  instinct  with  the  powers  of  redemption,  is  one  with  the 
life  of  God  Himself.  In  Christ  they  find  God  personally 
present  for  our  salvation  from  sin  and  death.  Yet  in  spite 
or  rather  because  of  this  basal  agreement  it  is  the  more 
impressive  to  contemplate  the  sovereign  freedom  with 
which  they  surveyed  Christ,  telling  what  they  saw  in  books 
which  have  been  quite  justly  described  as  literature,  not 
dogma.  Each  looked  at  Jesus  with  his  own  eyes ;  each 
spoke  out  of  his  own  mind ;  and  to  force  their  words  about 
Him  into  a  mechanical  and  external  harmony  is  simply  to 
misconceive  the  genius  of  Christian  faith. 

We  may  venture  to  determine  the  motives  operating 
within  the  New  Testament  mind  and  leading  its  spokesmen 
to  "  christologise  "  in  modes  which  transcend  the  theocratic 
ideas  of  Judaism.  In  the  main,  they  appear  to  have  been 
four  in  number.^ 

(1)  Reading  the  Old  Testament  with   Christian  eyes, 

'  Cf.  Harnack,  Dogmcngeschichte*,  i.  92. 


CHRISTOLOGICAL    MOTIVES  3 

they  felt  that  its  revelation  terminated  in  Jesus.  His 
person,  His  deeds,  His  fate  and  subsequent  victory  were 
recognised  as  constituting  a  real  and  even  a  precise  fulfil- 
ment of  prophecy.  From  tlie  days  of  the  fathers  God  had 
foretold  His  advent  and  prepared  His  way.  God  had 
foreseen  and  pre-ordained  Him,  and  in  Him  the  Church, 
and  had  committed  to  Him  the  task  of  establishing  the 
Divine  Kingdom.  How  great  then  must  this  Man  be,  and 
how  inevitable  that  minds  like  St.  Paul  should  seek  to 
express  His  greatness  under  the  highest  forms  provided  by 
first-century  thought. 

(2)  The  characteristic  Christian  faith  in  Jesus' 
exaltation  to  a  place  of  supramundane  and  universal 
power  impelled  to  reflection  those  who  held  it.  Their 
sense  of  His  Lordship  concerned  the  present  and  it 
concerned  the  future.  It  signified  the  joyous  assurance 
that  the  Holy  Spirit  given  by  Him  was  powerfully 
energising  in  believers  and  begetting  in  them  a  tran- 
scendent life ;  it  signified  also  that  He  would  come  at  last 
in  glory,  that  in  the  final  scene  of  all  He  would  be  revealed 
as  central  and  omnipotent.  This  consciousness  of  the 
Spirit  and  this  hope  of  the  Parousia  form  the  vital  heart 
of  the  primitive  Christology.  But  if  Jesus  is  now  so  great, 
can  He  have  reached  this  place  by  becoming  ?  Must  not 
the  antecedents  of  His  career  be  such  as  harmonise  with 
His  present  dignity  ? 

(3)  Thought  was  stimulated  by  the  success  of  mission- 
ary enterprise.  Apostolic  men  went  out  beyond  the 
Jewish  circle,  and  found  everywhere  that  the  Gospel 
made  its  own  impression.  With  ever-increasing  vividness 
it  became  clear  that  Jesus  was  for  the  whole  world.  His 
significance  was  as  universal  as  the  hunger  for  God  and 
righteousness.  He  must  therefore  be  defined  in  absolute 
and  universal  terms. 

(4)  Finally,  the  witness  of  Jesus  to  Himself  could  not 
but  quicken  thought  regarding  His  consciousness  of  a  unique 
Sonship  and  the  presuppositions  on  which  it  rested.  The 
time  came  when  searching  questions  were  put  by  hearers 


4  THE   PERSON   OF   JESUS    CHRIST 

of  the  Gospel  respecting  Jesus'  right  to  faith,  and  Jewish 
monotheists  could  not  decline  the  challenge.  Just  as  little 
could  they  omit  to  attach  fundamental  importance  to  the 
Lord's  own  words  concerning  His  relationship  to  God. 

These  four  kinds  of  impulse  represent  with  tolerable 
completeness  the  religious  forces  by  which  the  Christological 
activity  of  the  first  generation  was  controlled  and  inspired. 
And  in  a  real  sense,  though  in  different  measures,  each  of 
the  four  still  retains  its  old  value.  "  The  New  Testament 
writers,"  it  has  been  said,  "  did  not  think  of  Christology 
and  of  the  Atonement  without  sufficient  motives,  and  as 
long  as  their  sense  of  debt  to  Christ  survives,  the  motive 
for  thinking  on  the  same  subjects,  and  surely  in  the  main 
on  the  same  lines,  will  survive  also."  ^ 

*  Denney,  Jesii,s  and  the  Oos^el,  101. 


CHAPTER   I. 

CHRIST  IN  THE  SYxNOPTIC  GOSPELS. 

Our  point  of  view  in  this  study  of  Jesus'  personality,  as 
depicted  in  the  Synoptic  Gospels,^  is  determined  chiefly 
by  two  facts,  each  important  in  its  own  way.  To  begin 
with,  we  are  interested  more  in  convictions  than   in  the 

Literature — Scott,  The  Kingdom  and  the  Messiah,  1911  ;  Holtzmann, 
Das  messianische  Bewusstscin  Jesii,  1907  ;  Porter,  The  Messages  of  the 
Apocalyptical  Writers,  1905;  Bruce,  The  Kingdom  of  God'^,  1890; 
Sanday,  The  Life  of  Christ  in  Recent  Research,  1907  ;  Dalman,  Die  JForte 
Jesu,  1898  (Eng.  tr.  1902) ;  Schweitzer,  Von  Reimarus  zu  Wrede,  1908 
(Eng.  tr.  1910) ;  Steinbeck,  Das  gottliche  Selbsthewusstsein  Jesu  nach  dem 
Zcugnis  der  Synoptiktr,  1908  ;  Monnier,  La  mission  historique  de  Jesus, 
1908  ;  Titius,  Jesu  Lehre  vom  Beiche  Gottes,  1895. 

'  Jesus  is  j)reseiited  from  much  the  same  point  of  view  in  Mark,  Matthew, 
and  Luke,  the  broad  impression  being  identical  (cf.  our  familiar  phrase,  "the 
Jesus  of  the  Synoptics"),  though  in  each  case  a  variation  of  light  and  shade 
is  observable.  Thus  the  standpoint  of  Mark  is  indicated  by  1' :  "The 
gospel  of  Jesus  Christ,  the  Son  of  God."  He  has  a  specific  Christology  ; 
Jesus  was  Son  of  God  {i.e.  one  with  God  in  nature)  even  while  on  earth, 
and  is  so  addressed  at  the  Baptism,  the  first  recorded  incident  of  His  life, 
Mark  draws  Him  as  He  appeared  to  contemporaries,  living  out  the  truth 
of  Divine  Sonship.  There  is  no  story  of  birth  or  infancy.  While  the 
general  concejjtion  has  close  affinities  with  Paulinism  and  the  Fourth 
Gospel  (cf.  J.  Weiss,  Das  aelteste  Evangelium,  42  fl'.),  the  human  limitations 
of  this  Divine  personality  are  not  forgotten — witness  the  report  of  His 
inability  to  do  mighty  works  in  Nazareth  (6^).  In  Matthew,  on  the  other 
hand,  Jesus  appears  as  the  fulfilment  of  Old  Testament  hopes  and 
Messianic  predictions  ;  He  is  the  Son  of  David  and  of  Abraham.  But 
though  the  true  Christ  of  prophecy,  with  a  special  mission  to  Jews,  He  has 
been  rejected  by  His  own  nation  and  has  in  consequence  established  a 
Kingdom  of  all  peoples.  The  name  Immanuel  (God-with-us)  belongs  to 
Him.  Matthew  strongly  inclines  to  omit  statements  of  Mark  which  might 
seem  incongruous  with  a  proper  reverence  for  Jesus'  person  (see  Allen's 
Commentary,  xxxi  ff. ),  and  gives  prominence  to  our  Lord's  place  as  future 
Judge.  Luke,  while  not  obtruding  a  Christology  (he  resembles  Q  in  this), 
seizes  every  opjwrtuuity  to  accentuate   the  universality  of  Jesus'  mission. 

6 


6  THE    PERSON    OF   JESUS    CHRIST 

mental  processes  by  which  they  were  attained.  We  wish 
to  know  what  the  writers  of  the  first  three  Gospels 
believed  concerning  Jesus ;  it  is  for  us  a  less  urgent 
question  how  far  we  can  ascertain  the  exact  order  in 
which  the  varied  elements  of  this  belief  arose,  or  the 
influences  under  which  it  was  formulated  in  words.  That 
the  Evangelists  should  have  regarded  Jesus  as  Messiah  is 
obviously  a  fact  of  much  greater  significance  than  anything 
now  discoverable  as  to  the  successive  stages  of  their  faith. 
Once  we  have  made  out  their  convictions,  we  are  justified 
in  pleading  that  the  content  of  an  idea  must  not  be  con- 
fused with  its  history,  inasmuch  as  "  things  are  what  they 
are,  not  what  they  came  from."  Whatever  the  story  of 
its  genesis,  these  writers  had  gained  a  wonderful  impres- 
sion of  Jesus ;  this  impression  they  enshrined  in  books 
which  now  are  in  our  hands ;  and  from  these  books  we 
may  catch  that  impression  on  our  own  minds  without  a 
too  disturbing  pre-occupation  with  matters  of  chronology 
or  the  affiliation  of  conceptions. 

But  indeed — and  this  is  the  second  decisive  fact — 
the  character  of  the  Gospels  is  of  a  kind  which  makes 
chronological  exactitude  quite  impossible.  We  cannot 
date  any  of  the  three  with  certainty,  nor  can  we  arrange 
their  contents  in  a  temporal  order  which  commands  any- 
thing like  unanimous  assent.  To  a  considerable  extent 
the  investigation  of  the  life  of  Jesus,  in  recent  times,  has 
been  stultified  by  a  radical  error  in  method ;  the  error 
of    supposing    that    the  Gospels    are    biographies    in    the 

He  is  the  Son  of  God,  seeking  all  men  ;  hence  His  genealogy  is  traced  not 
merely  to  Abraham,  but  to  Adam.  The  evangelist's  chief  interest  centres 
in  His  supernatural  healing  ministry.  Both  Matthew  and  Luke  narrate 
the  Virgin-birth,  thus  apparently  referring  Jesus'  special  Sonship  to  His 
birth  from  the  Spirit. 

Q  is  an  entity  so  hypothetical  and  nebulous  that  any  attempt  to  draw 
out  its  Christology  nnist  be  in  a  high  degree  precarious.  Harnack  makes 
an  interesting  contribution  to  the  subject  in  his  Sayings  of  Jesus,  233  ff., 
based,  of  course,  on  his  special  construction  of  Q.  He  finds  that  the  com- 
piler of  Q  regarded  Jesus  as  the  Messiah,  consecrated  as  Son  of  God  at  the 
Baptism  ;  also  that  he  never  calls  our  Lord  6  Kvptos,  but  simply  Jesus,  or 
"  the  Christ." 


GOSPELS   NOT    BIOGRAPHIES  7 

modern  sense.  It  is  true  that  biography  involves  much 
more  tlian  a  precise  system  of  dates  hased  on  careful 
inquiry  into  the  relation  of  ditt'erent  episodes  to  each 
other,  yet  it  is  totally  iucoiK'cival)le  apart  from  some 
such  chronological  framework.  We  have  only  to  glance 
at  the  Synoptics  to  perceive  that  they  have  not  been  com- 
posed on  this  plan.  Their  purpose  is  simply  to  convey 
the  impression  of  a  great  Personality,  but  they  make  no 
attempt  to  cover  the  entire  life.  The  available  sources 
of  information  are  not  subjected  to  an  exact  scrutiny,  in 
the  manner  of  a  modern  scientific  historian  ;  nor  are  the 
person,  experience,  and  beliefs  of  the  central  Figure 
exhibited  as  conditioned  by  the  circumstances  of  His 
milieu.  Details,  wliether  of  the  career  of  Jesus,  or  of 
the  modes  in  which  the  whole  image  of  His  person 
stamped  itself  on  the  minds  of  His  disciples,  are  treated 
broadly,  with  the  essential  selective  freedom  of  the 
preacher.  They  depict  Jesus,  in  short,  as  any  onlooker 
of  goodwill  might  have  watched  Him  in  Palestine.  Two 
things  stand  out  boldly  in  their  narrative — the  portrait 
of  Jesus  as  He  lived  in  His  familiar  habit  among  men, 
His  personality  laden  with  Divine  grace  to  the  sinful ;  and 
on  the  other  hand,  the  believing  response  to  this  personal- 
ity more  and  more  evoked  in  human  souls.  But  in 
neither  case  can  we  fix  the  exact  progress  of  events. 
The  course  alike  of  Jesus'  self-revelation  and  of  the 
disciples'  adhesion  to  Him  is  only  discernible  in  part. 
And  yet  it  scarcely  matters.  The  character  and  work 
of  Jesus,  in  its  unique  redemptive  significance,  and  the 
reflection  of  it  gradually  formed  in  the  apostolic  mind, 
may  be  more  than  sufficiently  realised  and  interpreted 
by  means  of  the  evangelical  memoirs  we  possess. 

This  being  so,  we  may  justly  put  aside  here  most  of 
the  difficulties  in  the  Gospel  record  which  modern  criticism 
has  unearthed.  The  difficulties,  or  many  of  them,  are 
there  undeniably ;  but  their  importance  may  easily  be 
overestimated.  It  makes  comparatively  little  difference  in 
our  view  of  Jesus,  for  example,  whether  the  cleansing  of 


8  TTIE    PKRSON    OF   JESUS    CHRIST 

the  Temple  belongs  to  the  commencement  of  His  career 
or  to  its  close.  No  one  can  be  quite  sure  whether  His 
public  ministry  lasted  three  years  or  one ;  in  either  case 
our  belief  regarding  the  greatness  of  His  person  is  the 
same.  Similarly,  we  must  not  exaggerate  the  importance 
of  the  question  how  far  the  picture  of  Jesus  furnished 
by  the  Synoptics  has  been  substantially  affected  by  later 
Christian  experience.  The  possibility  of  this  cannot 
be  denied.  But  it  is  only  upon  the  hypothesis  that  the 
Christian  view  of  Jesus  is  mistaken  that  the  incidence 
of  this  modifying  force  would  form  a  legitimate  subject  of 
complaint.  If  in  some  transcendent  way  He  was  Son  of 
God,  those  who  believed  in  Him  must  have  required  a 
certain  period  of  time  to  realise  fully  the  magnitude  of  His 
person.  When  their  eyes  were  opened,  in  consequence 
of  the  resurrection,  what  they  beheld  was  no  free  and 
independent  creation  of  religious  fancy ;  it  was  the  deeper, 
eventual  truth  of  facts  now  appreciated  for  the  first  time. 
Faith,  in  other  words,  did  not  incapacitate  the  evangelists 
as  narrators ;  it  showed  them,  rather,  how  infinitely  the 
life  of  Jesus  deserved  narration.  The  impulse  to  select, 
to  fling  upon  words  or  incidents  a  light  answering  to  the 
later  situation  of  the  Church,  is  natural  and  intelligible ; 
what  is  not  so  is  an  impulse  to  deform  or  to  fabricate. 
"  Fidelity  to  the  historical  tradition,"  a  sympathetic  writer 
has  said,  "  was  undoubtedly  the  chief  aim  of  the  Synoptic 
writers.  Their  work  may  here  and  there  bear  traces  of 
theological  colouring,  but  their  first  interest  was  in  the 
facts.  Their  part  was  not  to  interpret,  but  simply  to 
record."  ^ 

We  assume,  then,  the  substantial  correctness  of  the 
Synoptic  portrait.  It  appeals  to  the  mind  of  the  true 
seeker  with  self-evidencing  and  harmonious  power.  The 
writers  have  nothing  of  pose,  of  doctrinal  inflexibility, 
of  mis- timed  literary  artifice.  Their  subject  has  been 
given  to  them ;  it  would  be  against  nature  for  them  to 
take    liberties  with   its    essential    meaning.      Besides,  the 

1  Professor  E.  F.  Scott,  Tlie  Fourth  Gospel,  2. 


JKSUS'    HUMAN    CHARACTKR  9 

uuifonn  quality  of  the  whole  guarantees  its  truth ;  its 
pure  originality  constitutes  a  certificate  of  origin.  As  the 
fragrance  dwells  in  each  rose-leaf,  so  all  the  uniqueness 
of  Jesus  is  present  in  each  word.  In  jeder  Acusserung 
stecJct  der  ganze  Mensch. 

To  repeat,  our  task  is  interpretative  rather  than 
historical  in  the  narrower  sense.  It  is  to  take  a  cross- 
section  of  the  Synoptic  view  of  Jesus,  with  the  object  of 
ditferentiating  the  elements  which  blend  in  it,  so  register- 
ing the  composite  impression  held  and  fixed  in  tradition. 
Now  in  the  deepest  sense,  the  Synoptic  view  of  Jesus  is 
simple,  with  the  simplicity  of  nature.  He  is  greater, 
indeed,  than  any  record  of  His  life ;  yet  it  also  has  caught 
from  Him  the  consistent  tone  of  simple  majesty.  On  the 
other  hand,  within  this  great  unity  we  encounter  differ- 
ences, contrasts,  individually  distinguishable  aspects,  each 
of  which  contributes  a  vital  element  to  the  whole.  His 
person  is  exhibited  in  a  variety  of  relations  to  God  and 
man.  Very  specially  what  He  claimed  to  be  was  expressed, 
by  Him  or  on  His  behalf,  in  a  few  profoundly  significant 
titles.  In  these  titles  are  gathered  up  the  ideas  which 
believers,  by  the  time  our  Gospels  were  composed,  had 
come  to  cherish  regarding  Jesus,  but  which,  as  they  held, 
sprang  originally  from  His  own  self- consciousness.  To 
understand  what  such  names  or  titles  mean  is  perhaps  to 
solve  the  hardest  and  most  elusive  problem  in  Synoptic 
Christology.  But  first  we  must  scrutinise  the  human 
portrait  the  evangelists  have  drawn. 

In  contemplating  Jesus  the  man,  as  mirrored  in  the 
Synoptics,  we  must  safeguard  ourselves  against  the 
tendency  to  signalise  in  His  character  those  features 
exclusively    which    attract     the    modern    miud.^     A    not 

^  Harnack    has    a    scathing   passage   on    "the   extreme   and    mutually 
exclusive"  views  of  Jesus'  individuality  to  be  found  in  modern  literature 
(Sayings  of  Jesux,    p.    xiii).      On  the   humiliating  controversy   as   to   the 
"  mystical "  Christ  and  the  "historical"  Jesus,  see  Muirhead's  articles  in  -^ 
the  Review  of  Thcolo(j}j  and  Pldlosophij,  vol.  vi.  577  tf. ,  633  t1". 


10  THK   PERSON   OF   JESUS    CHRIST 

unnatural  revolt  has  taken  place  from  the  mediaeval 
image.,  which  sank  deep  into  the  common  heart,  and 
which  had  represented  Him  chiefly  as  a  mild  and  lowly 
Sufferer,  quiet,  patient,  averse  to  conflict,  whose  life  and 
death  breathed  only  gentleness  and  calm.  To-day,  the 
pendulum  bids  fair  to  reach  the  opposite  extreme.  In 
many  a  modern  sketch,  Jesus  is  given  a  fiery  and  imperious 
temperament,  with  a  capacity  for  indignant  or  scornful 
passion  which  now  and  then  escapes  from  His  control. 
For  the  idol  of  our  time  is  strength,  and  the  supreme 
religious  personality  must  be  all  compact  of  power  and 
energy.  The  Gospels  confirm  neither  of  these  opposed 
delineations.  Indeed,  the  fashion  in  which  different  minds 
draw  from  the  same  record  widely  differing  conceptions  of 
the  central  Character  is  surely  a  suggestion  that  in  His 
person  there  met,  wondrously,  the  most  diverse  attributes 
and  dispositions  elsewhere  manifested  only  in  disparate  and 
one-sided  forms. 

The  evangelists  nowhere  seek  to  prove  Jesus'  manhood  ; 
it  is  for  them  a  tacit  and  self-evident  assumption.  He 
is  revealed  to  us  within  the  lines  and  dimensions  of  human 
experience ;  and  the  general  trustworthiness  of  the 
narrative  may  be  reckoned  from  the  fact  that  His 
higher  being,  though  accepted  by  the  writers,  is  never 
obtruded  incongruously  or  at  random.  Church  history  is 
rich  in  evidence  that  Christians  forget  the  manhood  of 
their  Lord  with  amazing  ease ;  but  they  have  done  so 
only  because  they  read  the  Gospels  with  veiled  face. 

Jesus'  bodily  and  mental  life  plainly  obey  the  rules 
of  natural  human  development.  Luke  sums  up  the 
scanty  recollections  of  His  childhood  in  the  statement 
that  "  Jesus  continued  to  advance  in  wisdom  and  stature, 
and  in  favour  with  God  and  man"  (2^^) ;  and  the  words 
enunciate  a  principle  that  covers  the  entire  life.  It  is 
impossible  to  conceive  a  point  at  which  the  evangelists 
would  have  held  that  He  had  nothing  more  to  learn  of 
His  Father's  will.  In  the  physical  sphere  He  is  authen- 
tically   man.        When     the     Temptation     was     past,    He 


THK    riETV    OF    JESUS  11 

hungered ;  on  the  cross  He  thirsted  and  longed  to  drink ; 
He  slept  from  weariness  in  the  boat  upon  the  lake.  His 
career  closed  in  pain  and  death  and  burial.  And  His 
soul-life  is  e(iually  normal.  There  were  hours  when  He 
rejoiced  in  spirit;  the  unbelief  of  His  own  countrymen 
moved  His  astonishment ;  He  marvelled  at  the  centurion's 
faith  ;  glimpses  of  His  heart  break  out  in  His  compassion 
for  the  unsliepherded  multitude  or  for  the  widow  of  Nain, 
in  the  brief  auger  with  which  He  drove  the  money- 
changers from  the  Temple,  in  the  desire  for  the  com- 
panionship of  the  Twelve,  in  His  tears  over  Jerusalem. 
Every  wholesome  emotion  touched  Him,  finding  fit  outlet 
in  word  or  act.  Most  significant  of  all,  His  piety  is 
human.  The  Baptism  and  Temptation  were  scenes  of 
prayer ;  He  was  found  by  disciples  praying  in  secret ;  it 
was  with  prayer  on  His  lips  that  He  healed  the  man 
deaf  and  dumb,  that  He  fed  the  multitude,  that  in  the 
garden  He  wrestled  through  the  agony  and  at  the  end 
gave  up  His  spirit.  No  shadow  of  estrangement  fell  on 
His  communion  ;  yet  the  unquenched  longing  with  which 
He  resorted  to  the  Father  betokens  a  deep,  consuming 
sense  of  need. 

Three  characteristics  of  Jesus'  personal  religion  are 
placed  by  the  Synoptic  Gospels  in  strong  relief. 
First,  His  faitli,  His  conscious  trust  in  God.  Here  lay 
the  source  of  the  felt  power  in  which  He  accomplished 
every  duty.  It  rested,  doubtless,  on  the  consciousness 
that  the  Father  and  He  were  bound  by  unseen  ties,  yet 
as  it  filled  and  controlled  thought  and  act  we  feel  it  to 
be  something  which  we  are  being  called  to  imitate,  because 
ideally  and  distinctively  the  faith  of  man.  So  He  was 
enabled  to  cast  His  burden  on  the  Lord,  all  the  mure 
completely  as  the  Cross  drew  near.  Nowhere  does  Jesus' 
trust  in  God  appear  more  wonderful  than  in  presence 
of  the  catastrophe  which,  in  outward  semblance,  was  to 
sweep  down  His  person  and  His  cause  to  common  ruin. 
If  He  triumphed  in  prospect  of  a  death  for  sin,  it  was 
through  a  confident   reliance  on  the  Father.      And  from 


12  THE    PERSON    OF    JESUS    CHRIST 

this  flowed  His  peace.  The  untroubled  calm  of  soul  we 
mark  in  Him  was  manifested  less  during  His  passion, 
when  He  was  faced  by  His  foes,  than  in  the  more  testing 
hours  just  before,  when  He  parted  from  His  friends.  But 
frequently  in  the  course  of  His  public  ministry  there  is 
visible  a  profound  contrast  between  tumult  and  uproar 
round  about  Him  and  the  interior  calm  of  a  heart  at  rest 
in  God.  This  inward  rest  He  strove  to  impart  to  others 
(Mt  1128;  cf.  Jn  1627).  Finally,  He  was  actuated  by  an 
infinite  love,  which  may  be  said  to  have  formed  the  very 
substance  of  His  nature.  It  was  primarily  love  to  God, 
in  whom  were  the  well-springs  of  His  life,  but  it  over- 
flowed in  a  comprehensive  love  to  man. 

Jesus  felt  keenly  the  pressure  of  temptation.  The 
impulse  of  self-preservation  could  not  become  conscious 
without  inducing  the  distress  of  moral  conflict.  We  find 
Him  wrestling  with  the  desire  to  evade  pain,  to  enjoy 
things  wholesome  and  lovely,  to  command  success  and 
acquire  influence.  Had  He  not  shrunk  from  death.  He 
would  have  belonged  to  another  race  than  ours.  And  in 
the  struggle  thus  forced  on  Him,  He  knew  the  power  of  sin 
so  far  as  it  may  be  known  apart  from  self -identification 
with  its  evil ;  so  far,  yet  no  further.  Christendom  speaks 
of  "  the  Temptation,"  as  if  that  which  followed  His  baptism 
were  an  isolated  fact.  But  the  pressure  lasted  to  the 
end ;  and  few  things  in  the  Gospels  are  more  subduing 
than  the  words  in  which  Jesus  gratefully  acknowledges 
the  fidelity  of  those  who  had  remained  with  Him  through- 
out His  trials  (Lk  2T-^^-). 

The  Jesus  of  the  Synoptics  shares  in  the  common 
secular  beliefs  of  His  own  time.  His  human  faculties 
operate  in  media  coloured  and  impregnated  by  the  great 
movements  of  the  past.  He  appears  on  the  page  of  history 
as  a  Jew  of  the  first  century,  with  the  Jewish  mind  and 
temperament.  To  interpret  His  message  we  need  not 
travel  out  beyond  the  Hebrew  frontier;  nothing  is  here 
from  the  wisdom  of  Buddha  or  Plato,  nothing  even  from 
the  fusion  of  Hellenism  and  Hebraism  in  the  crucible  of 


LIMITATIONS  OF  KNOWLEDGE  13 

Alexandria.  He  was  nurtured  in  Galilee,  where  He  must 
liave  encountered  some  impressions  of  the  larger  world  ; 
l)ut  little  in  His  teaching  recalls  Greco-Koman  civilisation. 
Nevertheless,  the  universality  of  His  spirit  has  athnities 
with  the  nobler  mind  of  Greece.  In  the  main  His  soul 
drew  its  nourishment  from  prophet  and  psalmist ;  yet 
there  was  that  in  Him,  He  knew,  which  would  make  Him 
comprehended  and  efficacious  in  the  world  outside  Palestine. 
"The  character  of  Jesus,"  it  has  been  said,  "does  not 
reveal  Jewish  traits  merely,  but  such  also  as  are  Hellenic 
in  the  larger  sense,  so  that  in  Him  these  definite  types  of 
manhood  wonderfully  complement  and  balance  each  other. 
The  fulness  of  the  times  had  come."  ^ 

It  has  gradually  become  clear  that  to  make  Jesus 
responsible  for  such  things  as  the  details  of  an  ethico- 
political  system,  valid  for  all  time,  or  to  invast  His  words 
with  legal  authority  in  matters  of  Biblical  criticism  and 
history,  is  wholly  misleading  and  irrelevant.  The  realm 
of  scientific  knowledge  is  one  in  which  He  became 
like  unto  His  brethren.  Incontestably  He  exhibits  at 
different  times  a  wholly  abnormal  penetration,  a  perception 
of  men's  thoughts  which  far  outstrips  the  insight  even 
of  prophets.  But  we  cannot  speak  of  His  omniscience 
except  as  we  desert  the  sources.  "  Of  that  day  or  that 
hour,"  He  said  plainly,  "  knoweth  no  one,  not  even  the 
angels  in  heaven,  nor  yet  the  Son,  but  tlie  Father " 
(Mk  13^2) — a  declaration  of  ignorance  which,  it  is  sug- 
gestive to  note,  is  not  insisted  on  after  the  resurrection 
(Ac  1^).  Along  with  this  goes  the  fact  that  He  makes 
inquiries  and  manifests  surprise ;  but  that  in  doing  so  He 
was  acting  a  part  is  credible  only  to  the  incurably  docetic 
mind. 

It  also  appears  from  the  Synoptic  narrative  that 
the  mighty  works  of  Jesus  were  not  done  out  of  (as  it 
were)  independent  personal  resources,  but  through  power 
received  from  God.  The  Father  had  bestowed  on  Him 
the  Messianic  Lordship  over  all  things  embraced  within 
'  von  Soden,  Die  icichtifjsten  Fragen  im  Leben  Jesv,  110. 


14  THE    PERSON    OF    JESUS    CHRIST 

His  life-work ;  this  delegated  authority  He  exercised  in 
faith  and  acknowledged  with  thanksgiving.  He  ascribes 
the  glory  of  His  miracles  to  the  Father.  At  the  same 
time,  the  verdict  passed  on  Nazareth  to  the  effect  that, 
owins  to  the  unbelief  He  encountered  there,  Jesus  could 
work  no  miracle  (Mk  6^),  has  often  been  misconstrued. 
The  meaning  is  not  that  the  people's  mistrust  deprived 
Him  of  Messianic  power ;  it  is  rather  that  the  ethical  con- 
ditions of  reception  being  absent,  a  moral  impossibility 
existed  that  He  should  put  His  power  in  active  operation. 
Christology  of  an  a  'priori  tendency  has  too  often  been 
permitted  to  encroach  upon  the  interpretation  of  the  first 
three  Gospels,  with  results  equally  disconcerting  and 
incoherent.  Attempts,  for  example,  to  vindicate  for  Jesus 
a  "  double  consciousness  "  or  a  "  double  will  " — the  one 
human  and  beset  with  limitations,  the  other  infinite  and 
Divine — merely  impose  on  the  evangelic  data  a  dogmatic 
schematism  of  much  later  origin,  thus  gravely  impeding 
the  work  of  objective  inquiry.  Not  only  do  they  break 
the  marvellous  unity  of  impression  created  by  His  person ; 
they  are  the  outcome  of  a  tendency,  mistaken  though 
devout,  to  reflect  on  these  earthly  years  the  radiant 
glory  of  the  exalted  Christ.  But  this  is  to  ignore  the 
well-marked  New  Testament  distinction  in  the  mani- 
fested being  of  Jesus  before  the  resurrection  and  after. 
To  the  apostolic  mind,  the  life  of  the  Ascended  One  was 
no  mere  prolongation  of  the  earthly  career.  It  was  an 
existence  charged  with  a  higher  power,  because  invested 
with  new  and  universal  attributes.  To  ignore  the  human 
conditions  of  the  historic  life,  therefore,  is  to  miss  the 
contrast  of  earthly  humiliation  and  ascended  majesty.  It  is 
also  to  miss  the  vast  redeeming  sacrifice  of  God ;  for  these 
circumstances  of  self-abnegating  limitation  form  the  last 
and  highest  expression  of  the  love  wlierewith  the  Father 
bowed  down  to  bless  us  in  the  Son. 

A  constitutive  element  in   the  faith  of  Israel  had  long 
been  the  hope  of  the  Messiah,  conceived  not  as  a  second 


JESUS   THE    MESSIAH  15 

God,  but  as  the  Saviour-representative  of  Jehovah.  This 
Messianic  faith  is  a  projection  into  history  of  faith  in  the 
hving  God.  It  is  natural,  accordingly,  that  the  first 
article  of  the  new  Christian  creed  should  have  been  the 
Messiahship  of  Jesus,  the  crucified  and  risen  Nazarene. 
In  the  Synoptics  the  name  "  Christ,"  the  Greek  equiva- 
lent of  Messiah,  is  always  an  official,  never  a  personal, 
name. 

The  problem  of  the  Messiahship,  however,  entered  on  a 
quite  new  phase  when  certain  recent  scholars,  and  particularly 
Wrede,  taking  up  the  suggestions  of  Lagarde  and  Volkmar, 
put  forward  the  contention  that  the  Messianic  claim  was 
never  made  by  Jesus,  but  was  read  back  into  the  history  in 
the  sub-apostolic  age.  The  hypothesis  cannot  be  regarded 
as  a  happy  one.  We  can  point  to  a  series  of  incidents 
which  make  it  virtually  certain  that  Jesus  felt  Himself  to 
be  Messiah,  and  declared  His  consciousness  of  the  fact  to 
others.^  Proof  positive  is  furnished  by  the  narrative  of  \ 
the  Temptation,  which  is  meaningless  except  as  related  to 
a  preceding  Messianic  experience ;  by  His  message  to  the 
Baptist  in  prison  (Mt  IV^-) ;  by  the  epoch-making  words 
of  Peter  at  Csesarea  Philippi  (Mk  8^^) ;  by  Jesus'  solemn 
entry  into  Jerusalem ;  by  His  open  confession  before  the 
high  priest ;  by  the  mocking  cries  flung  at  Him  during  the 
crucifixion ;  finally,  by  the  inscription  placed  above  His 
head.  Even  the  view  defended  by  certain  recent  writers, 
to  the  effect  that  Jesus  claimed  Messianic  dignity  only 
for  the  future,  as  Messias  designatus,  but  refrained  from 
asserting  it  as  an  actually  present  fact,  fails  to  satisfy  the 
recorded  data.  It  brings  out  the  cardinal  truth,  however, 
that  for  Jesus'  own  mind  the  future  coming  of  the  Messiah 
in  glory  constituted  His  most  characteristic  and  decisive 

'  This  is  quite  compatible  with  the  view  that,  prior  to  the  resurrection, 
it  was  only  in  hours  of  specially  heightened  feeling  that  His  disciples 
recognised  His  Messiahship,  that  they  used  the  name  with  only  a  partial 
consciousness  of  its  implications,  and  that  as  He  hung  on  the  Cross  their 
faith  was  eclipsed  (cf.  Lk  24^').  Yon  Soden  has  a  fine  passage  on  the 
ex|ierimental  basis  of  the  disciples'  faitli  in  Jesus  as  Messiah  in  Theologische 
Abfuindlunyen  Weizsacker  gewidraet,  167  f. 


16  THE    PERSON    OF   JESUS    CHRIST 

Messianic  work.      Death  would  invest  Him  with  the  full 
exercise  of  His  official  power. 

A  more  important  question  yet  remains :  Jesus 
believed  Himself  to  be  Messiah ;  where  lay  the  meaning 
of  this  title  for  His  mind  ?  We  are  so  far  able  to 
determine  its  meaning  for  His  contemporaries.  In  Jewish 
religion  (cf.  Ps  2)  "  the  Christ "  denotes  the  anointed  Head 
and  Lord  of  the  Divine  Kingdom,  ruling  over  a  redeemed 
people  in  bliss  and  majesty.  The  Messiah  was  conceived 
now  as  a  superhuman  figure,  now  as  a  man  chosen  and 
endowed  for  His  unique  task.  Bousset  remarks  that  the 
Messianic  hopes  of  the  Jews  in  our  Lord's  day  must  have 
oscillated  between  the  poles  of  pure  earthliness  and  pure 
transcendence.  No  universally  acknowledged  type  of 
faith  prevailed.  Even  John  the  Baptist,  with  his  robe 
of  camel's  hair  and  his  thundering  prophecies  of  judgment, 
could  be  taken  for  the  Messiah.  But  in  general  the 
function  of  the  Coming  One  was  believed  to  be  the 
inauguration  of  the  new  Kingdom,  a  catastrophic  judgment 
being  the  essential  prelude  to  His  work. 

Jesus'  attitude  to  this  ancient  hope  may  be  defined  by 
saying  that  while  retaining  the  traditional  outline  of  the 
idea,  He  infused  into  it  a  fresh  and  spiritual  content.  It 
still  pointed  to  the  King  of  the  Divine  Kingdom ;  it  still 
involved  the  redemption  of  the  subjects  by  One  anointed 
for  the  task ;  but  the  significance  both  of  "  kingdom  "  and 
of  "  redemption  "  underwent  a  radical  transformation.  His 
reading  of  the  name  was  new  even  when  compared  with 
the  prophetic  thought  of  the  Old  Testament.  Every 
political  suggestion  fell  away,  every  hope  of  national 
predominance ;  the  office  was  conceived  for  the  first  time 
in  spiritual  and  ethical— even  if  eschatological — terms. 
At  this  decisive  point,  therefore,  Jesus  broke  with  tradi- 
tion. His  purpose  declared  itself  at  the  Temptation,  when 
He  turned  once  for  all  from  the  received  Messianic  ideal  to 
identify  Himself  with  a  conception  till  then  unheard  of. 
Thenceforward  to  be  Messiah  signified  for  His  mind  not 
the  work  of  a  religious  Teacher,  or  of  a  new  Lawgiver,  but 


RESERVE    OF    JESUS  17 

the  vocation  of  One  wlio  must  l)ring  complete  salvation  for 
sinful  men,  opening  the  Kingdom  of  God  to  all  believers. 
His  life  and  death  are  the  only  worthy  comment  on  His 
thought.  "  Jesus  was  greater  than  any  name,  and  we 
must  interpret  the  names  He  uses  through  the  Person  and 
His  experiences  and  powers,  and  not  the  Person  through  a 
formal  definition  of  the  names."  ^ 

The  consciousness  that  He  was  the  Messiah  must  have  ^ 
come  to  Jesus  not  later  than  His  baptism.  No  other 
point  of  time  has  any  claim  to  rank  as  the  commencement 
of  the  fully  recognised  vocation.  We  cannot  tell  through 
what  inward  experiences  this  certainty  took  possession  of 
Him ;  and  it  is  vain  to  guess.  The  vision  vouchsafed  to 
Him  at  the  Jordan  was  such  that  He  Himself  must  be 
regarded  as  the  source  of  the  main  elements  of  the 
narrative.  In  that  hour  He  knew  Himself  summoned  by 
the  Father  to  fulfil  the  Messianic  work,  and  was  filled  with 
the  power  and  knowledge  requisite  for  His  task  by  the 
reception  of  the  Holy  Spirit. 

It  is  at  first  disconcerting  to  find  that  Jesus'  self- 
avowal  as  Messiah  was  characterised  by  singular  reserve. 
Nor  is  this  explicable  by  the  inadequacy  and  unspiritu- 
ality  of  the  traditional  conception ;  for,  as  we  have  seen,  it 
was  still  open  to  Jesus  to  make  of  the  title  what  He  chose. 
It  has  been  suggested  that  Jesus  was  silent  concerning  His 
Messiahship  simply  because  it  was  for  long  a  problem  to 
His  own  mind ;  we  ought  to  think  of  it  as  dawning  on 
Him  gradually,  through  a  process  of  doubt  and  struggle. 
But  this  seems  to  be  incompatible  with  the  decisive  im- 
portance of  His  baptism,  which  called  Him  to  a  task  He 
must  have  regarded  as  Messianic.  The  true  explanation 
appears  to  lie  in  the  familiar  consideration  that  Jesus' 
novel  conception  of  the  Kingdom,  as  the  reign  of  the  loving 
and  holy  Father,  entailed  also  a  novel  conception  of  His  own 
function.      His  partial  concealment  is  therefore  due  to  the 

^  Denney,  Jesus  amd  the  Gosjtd,  208.  On  the  ethical  side,  we  get  onr 
clearest  look  at  what  our  Lord  meant  by  Messiahship  in  His  message  to  the 
Baptist  in  prison  (Mt  ll^*^-). 

2 


18  THE   PERSON    OF   JESUS    CHRIST 

all  but  insurmountable  difficulty  of  proclaiming  Himself  as 
the  Messiah  without  stirring  into  flame   passions  of  a  kind 
which  would  have  rendered  the  people  deaf  to  His  unique 
message.      Thus  it  is  significant  that  in  Nazareth  (Lk  4^'^) 
He  is  represented  as  assuming  the  role  simply  of  a  prophet. 
The  confession  of  Peter  at  Caesarea  Philippi  was  in  all 
probability  the  first  occasion  on  which  the  Messiahship  of 
Jesus  was  made  the  subject  of  conversation  by  the  Master 
and   the   disciples.      It   does   not   follow   that  Jesus'  real 
dignity  then  for  the    first   time   suggested   itself    to    the 
Twelve.     There  are  facts  (cf.  Jn  1)  which  indicate  that  the 
possibility  of  His  being  the  Messiah  may  have  occurred 
to  His  followers  from  the  very  outset.     What  is  new  in 
Peter's  confession  is  its  personal  assurance  and  devotion ; 
and  it  is  this,  not  its  being  a  flash  of    religious  genius, 
which    evoked    the   unusual    emotion   vibrating   in  Jesus' 
answer.     Here  then,  in  Holtzmann's  phrase,^  lies  the  true 
peripeteia  of  the  drama,  on  which   the  entire  action  turns. 
Jesus    now    explicitly  accepts   the  Messianic  name ;    nay 
more,  in  the  fact  that  it  has  been  attributed  to  Him  He 
finds   clear  evidence    that  the  Twelve  were  beginning  to 
attain  true  convictions  on  the  subject  of  His  person.     Yet 
there  remained  the  possibility  of    further  misconception; 
and  Jesus  therefore  at  once  proceeded  to  check  the  forma- 
tion of  too  secular  hopes  by  uttering  a  definite  prediction 
of  His  death  (Mk  8^^).      But  it  was  only  by  His  entry  into 
the   city   and   during  the   trial   before  Caiaphas  that  He 
announced  His  Messiahship  to  the  world  at  large. 

In  Jesus'  hands  the  idea  of  Messiahship  came  to  be 
associated  with  unprecedented  claims.  "  By  His  heathen 
judge  He  was  condemned,"  Dalman  writes,  "  as  a  usurper 
of  the  throne ;  by  the  Jewish  tribunal,  as  One  who 
pretended  to  such  a  place  as  had  never  been  conceded  even 
to  the  Messiah."  ^  In  short,  for  Jesus  to  use  the  title  was 
ipso  facto  to  supersede  it.  While  therefore  it  is  true  that 
the  Messianic  claim  was  indispensable  as  a  mode  of  express- 

^  Das  me/isianische  Beumsstsein  Jesu,  86. 
'  Die  IVorte  Jesu,  i.  257. 


UNPRECEDENTED    CLAIMS  19 

ing  our  Lord's  vocation  within  the  lines  of  Jewish  religious 
history,  the  title  in  itself  is  the  product  of  a  special  develop- 
ment, and  was  bound  to  give  place  to  forms  more  adequate 
and  universal.^  This  is  this  truth  which  has  been  put 
falsely,  or  at  least  confusedly,  by  saying  that  Jesus  always 
felt  Messiahship  a  burden,  and  would  have  dispensed  with 
it  if  He  could.  The  hand  which  Jesus  laid  upon  traditional 
Messianism  was  that  of  a  creative  master.  At  each  point 
He  was  free  of  the  conceptions  of  the  past. 

It  was  especially  through  His  anticipation  of  the  Cross 
that  Jesus  rose  above  the  limits  of  the  older  thought. 
How  early  this  anticipation  visited  His  mind  we  have  not 
the  information  to  decide ;  but  the  view  expressed  by 
Holtzmann,^  that  any  one  who  regards  the  story  of  the 
baptism  as  containing  really  credible  recollections  of  a 
definite  point  at  which  Jesus'  Messianic  consciousness  was 
born,  and  who  holds  also  that  His  conception  of  "  Messiah  " 
is  related  to  Dn  7,  may  reasonably  believe  that  our  Lord 
had  the  prospect  of  death  before  Him  from  the  first,  is  a 
noteworthy  concession  to  the  inherent  probabilities  of  the 
case.  However  this  may  be,  at  all  events  it  is  certain 
that  Jesus  was  the  first  to  make  current  coin  of  the  idea 
of  a  suffering  Messiah.  In  pre-Christian  Judaism,  Is  53 
had  never  been  interpreted  in  a  Messianic  sense.  In  that 
sublime  picture  of  vicarious  pain,  however,  there  lay  truths 
which  found  a  perfect  echo  and  fulfilment  in  Jesus'  soul.^ 
Thus  it  was,  we  may  surmise,  that  for  Him  the  ancient 
conception  of  Israel's  national  Messiah  was  so  glorified  as 
to  pass  into  that  of  the  Eedeemer  of  the  world. 

We  now  turn  to  what  has  justly  been  described  as  the 
most  confused   and   intricate  problem  in  New  Testament 

'  But  as  Peter  used  it,  it  expresses  in  its  own  way  the  same  idea  of 
uniqueness  and   absoluteness   as  we  find  elsewhere  in  the  names  vlos  and 

KliptOS. 

2  Op.  cit.  88. 

*  Cf.  Professor  H.  A.  A.  Kennedy's  articles  in  the  Ex2>ository  Times  for 
1908.  Is  53  also  contains  the  idea  of  the  Servant's  resurrection  and  His 
subsequent  career  of  etfectual  activity. 


20  THE    PERSON    OF   JESUS    CHRIST 

Theology.  This  is  tlie  meaning  given  by  Jesus  to  the  name 
"  Son  of  man."  From  the  point  of  view  both  of  ideas  and 
of  history  we  are  still  engaged  vj-ith  the  preceding  topic, 
since  the  adoption  of  the  title  "  Son  of  man  "  may  itself 
stand  for  a  quite  definite  interpretation  of  Messiahship. 
It  broadens  and  universalises  a  conception  which  had 
shown  itself  capable  of  very  narrow  limitations. 

"  Son  of  man  "  is  only  used  by  Jesus  in  the  Synoptics, 
virtually  always  as  a  self-designation.  It  is  at  least 
obvious  that  the  evangelists  understand  it  so.  The  name 
occurs  as  early  as  Mk  2^°.  Many  scholars  believe  that 
Jesus  employed  it  only  after  Peter's  great  confession ;  but 
it  is  possible  that  He  had  used  it  long  before.  Not  till 
His  trial,  however,  did  the  significance  of  the  claim  dawn 
upon  the  wider  public.  Its  total  absence  from  New 
Testament  writings  other  than  the  Gospels  (except  Ac  7^^) 
is  easily  explained  by  its  practical  inconvenience,  since  it 
is  "  as  curious  a  phrase  in  Greek  as  in  English,"  ^  and  would 
be  familiar  only  to  Jews.  But  the  later  disappearance  of 
the  name  at  once  puts  out  of  court  the  suggestion  that  in 
the  Synoptics  it  is  due  to  interpolation. 

In  Matthew,  Mark,  and  Luke  the  title  is  found  on 
Jesus'  lips  about  seventy  times,  representing  forty  occasions 
more  or  less.  The  notion  that  it  properly  means  "  some- 
body "  may  be  put  aside.  In  such  verses  as  "  The  Son 
of  man  is  come  eating  and  drinking"  (Mt  11^^),  and 
"  Betrayest  thou  the  Son  of  man  with  a  kiss  ? "  (Lk  2  2*^), 
it  is  manifestly  applied  by  Jesus  to  Himself.  That  our 
Lord  should  speak  of  Himself  in  the  third  person  is  not 
necessarily  unnatural,  for  St.  Paul  does  the  same  thing 
(2  Co  12-);  besides,  the  title  was  tolerably  familiar  as  a 
title.  We  have  no  guarantee,  of  course,  that  all  these 
three-score  texts  give  a  perfectly  accurate  report  of  Jesus' 
words ;  and  allowance  must  be  made  for  the  possibility 
that  "  Son  of  man  "  has  in  some  cases  been  inserted  by  the 
evangelist.  But  the  necessary  deductions  under  this  head 
are  so  few  as  to  leave  the  main  result  unaffected.  It  is 
^  Burkitt,  Earliest  Sources  for  the  Life  of  Jesus,  64. 


SON    OF    MAN    AS    A    TITLE  21 

noticeable,  further,  that  the  passages  containing  the  name 
fall  naturally  into  two  groups  according  as  they  refer 
(a)  to  Jesus'  earthly  work,  especially  as  it  culminates  in 
suffering  and  death,  or  {h)  to  the  final  glory  of  His 
Parousia.  Speaking  broadly,  "  Son  of  man  "  occurs  more 
frequently  towards  the  close  of  the  Gospel  story,  while  the 
proportion  of  passages  tinged  with  eschatology  mounts 
rapidly  at  the  end.  These  facts  are  themselves  a  valuable 
indication  that  some  intimate  relationship  existed  in  Jesus' 
own  mind  between  the  name  "  Son  of  man "  and  His 
impending  death. 

The  first  source  of  the  name  is  irrecoverably  lost  in 
far-past  ages,^  but  we  are  justified  in  believing  that  its 
nearer,  proximate  source  is  Dn  7^^.  This,  it  may  be 
noted,  is  one  of  the  few  points  on  which  scholars  have 
reached  virtual  agreement.  We  are  carried  back,  then, 
to  the  Danielle  vision  in  which,  after  the  bestial  forms 
symbolising  the  four  heathen  empires,  there  emerges  a 
symbolical  human  Figure  on  whom  the  universal  Kingdom 
is  conferred.  "  Behold,  there  came  with  the  clouds  of 
heaven  one  like  unto  a  son  of  man  .  .  .  and  there  was 
given  him  dominion,  and  glory,  and  a  kingdom,  that  all 
the  peoples,  nations,  and  tongues  should  serve  him." 
Whether  "  one  like  unto  a  son  of  man  "  denotes  the  ideal 
Israel  or  an  individual  is  uncertain,  though  the  former  view 
is  more  convincing.  But  in  the  Similitudes  of  Enoch,  as 
Professor  Burkitt  puts  it,  "  the  figure  of  Daniel,  the  Son 
of  Man  who  was  with  the  Ancient  of  Days,  is  personified 
and  individualised.  From  of  old  this  Son  of  Man,  this 
celestial  human  being,  has  been  hidden  with  the  Most 
High,  but  one  day  He  will  be  revealed."  ^  Jesus  was 
probably  familiar  with  this  circle  of  ideas,  and  nearly 
everywhere  His  use  of  the  name  is  only  intelligible  if  it 
denotes  an  individual  person.  It  has  indeed  been  argued 
that  the  distinction  which  exists  in  Greek  between  "  man  " 

^  For  the  "religioiisgeschiclitlich  "  view,  see  Weinel,  Bihlische  Theologie 
des  NT  (1911),  30  ;  Bousset,  Hau^itprohleme  dcr  Gnosis,  149  ff. 
"  Op.  cit.  85. 


22  THE   PERSON    OF   JESUS  CHRIST 

simply  and  "  Son  of  man  "  could  not  have  been  expressed 
by  one  speaking,  as  Jesus  did,  in  Aramaic ;  and  that 
accordingly  the  phrase  for  Him  must  have  really  meant 
nothing  more  than  "  man  in  general."  In  the  first  place, 
however,  the  linguistic  facts  are  doubtful.  Dalman,  with 
whom  Dr.  Driver  agrees,  has  stated  what  seem  excellent 
reasons  for  denying  that  "  man "  could  be  expressed 
in  Aramaic  in  no  way  except  this ;  "  Son  of  man,"  it  is 
possible,  may  be  a  literal  rendering  of  an  independent 
Aramaic  phrase.  Apart  from  this,  however,  even  if  we 
concede  that  the  Aramaic  term  was  equivalent  to  "  man  " 
simply,  still  "  the  Man,"  used  by  Jesus  as  a  title  for  Him- 
self or  His  office  must  have  been  employed  in  sensu 
eminenti ;  must  have  meant  the  special,  or  well-known, 
or  unique  "  Man."  ^  Nor  can  Dr.  Sanday's  suggestion  be 
overlooked  that,  since  Jesus  may  have  spoken  Greek,  6  uto? 
ToO  dvdpcoirov  may  have  been  one  of  His  own  phrases. 

But  what  does  the  term  mean  ?  To  begin  with,  it  is 
almost  certainly  unbiblical  to  explain  it  as  equivalent  to 
"  man  in  idea  "  or  "  the  ideal  man."  Baur,  slightly  modi- 
fying this,  takes  it  as  equivalent  to  one  qui  oiikil  Immani 
sibi  alienum  putat ;  Wellhausen  thinks  it  equal  to  "  man 
normal  in  relation  to  God,"  although,  since  Jesus  was 
neither  a  Greek  philosopher  nor  a  modern  humanist,  this 
signification,  in  his  judgment,  proves  sufficiently  that  the 
phrase  was  never  used  by  Jesus.  He  is  at  least  right  in  the 
contention  that  ideal  humanity  is  a  Greek  or  modern,  not 
a  Jewish,  conception  ;  and  while  it  is  undoubtedly  embodied 
in  the  character  of  the  Son  of  man  as  realised  in  Jesus, 
it  forms  no  part  of  the  connotation  of  the  term.  On  the 
other  hand,  there  is  no  foundation  for  the  older  dogmatic 
theory  that  our  Lord's  intention,  in  using  the  title,  was 
to  assert  distinctly  His  real  manhood ;  for  of  His  real 
manhood  the  audience  could  not  be  in  doubt.  The  truth, 
so  far  as  I  can  judge,  appears  to  be  something  like  this : 
Jesus  took  the  name,  in  a  spirit  of  complete  freedom, 
from  the  familiar  Danielle  verse,  possibly  being  influenced 
'  Cf.  Bousset,  Die  Religion  des  Judenthiums  (1  Aufl  ),  252. 


THE    TITLE    A    PARADOX  23 

in  some  degree  also  by  the  Siuiililiules  of  Enoch.  He 
began  by  using  it  to  denote  His  own  special  or  repre- 
sentative humanity,  as  appointed  to  future  glory  and 
transcendent  sway ;  but  with  this,  especially  in  the  later 
months,  He  combined  a  note  of  sharp  contrast,  defining 
and  enriching  the  primary  signification  by  the  added 
thought  of  suffering.^  In  any  case,  contrast  is  of  the 
very  essence  of  the  trutli.  Triumphant  glory,  over-against 
which  is  set  utter  self-abasement  and  humiliation — this, 
on  the  whole,  is  the  meaning  fixed  for  us  by  a  careful 
scrutiny  of  the  Synoptic  usage. 

It  is  not  too  much  to  say,  indeed,  that  Jesus,  in  His 
selection  of  the  name,  had  an  educative  purpose.  It  was 
a  spiritual  mystery,  a  problem  not  less  than  a  disclosure. 
Tradition  had  defined  the  title  only  imperfectly  ;  it  awaited 
final  interpretation  :  and  this  Jesus  gave  by  stamping  on 
it  the  impress  of  Himself.  As  the  marble  takes  shape 
under  the  sculptor's  chisel,  masses  of  rejected  matter  fall 
away ;  so  Jesus  drew  forth  from  the  potentialities  of  the 
conception  that  which  harmonised  with  His  own  higher 
thouo-ht.  In  His  hands  the  name  provoked  reflection. 
While  in  no  sense  an  obvious  appellation  of  the  Messiah — 
otherwise  tlie  question  of  Mt  lO^^.  « Who  do  men  say 
that  the  Son  of  man  is  ? "  would  be  inept — it  yet  proved 
suggestive  of  Messiahship  to  those  who  cared  to  search 
deeper.  Into  the  title  furnished  by  tradition  He  poured 
a  significance  of  His  own  which  transcended  the  past ; 
for  in  affirming,  e.g.  that  the  Son  of  man  had  power  on 
earth  to  forgive  sins  (Mk  2^'^),  He  rose  above  inherited 
and  conventional  ideas.  The  name  was  designed  to 
indicate  not  so  much  the  nature  as  the  vocation  of  its 
Bearer ;  it  signalised  the  transcendent  place  and  function 
still  awaiting  Him.  Of  the  available  modes  of  self- 
description  it  was  the  least  political,  and  as  on  other 
occasions  He  appears  to  deprecate  the  title  "  Son  of  David  " 
as  too  provocative,  or  at  least  as  irrelevant  to  the  true 
conception  of  Messiahship,  so  Jesus  chose  the  apocalyptic 

1  We  must  never  lose  sight  of  Is  53  ;  cf.  Feine,  Thtologic  d.  NT,  68. 


24  THE    PERSON    OF   JESUS    CHRIST 

name  of  Son  of  man,  especially  near  the  end,  as  one  which 
laid  the  required  emphasis  on  the  future  greatness  thus 
far  concealed  under  obscurity  and  destined  to  be  still 
more  darkly  eclipsed  in  death.  And  the  solution  of  this 
apparent  antinomy  He  found  in  the  decisive  significance 
of  His  cross.  So  far  from  rendering  His  future  glory 
impossible,  it  was  to  be  the  gate  of  entrance  to  His 
consummation. 

In  the  Synoptics,  accordingly,  our  Lord's  usage  of  the 
title  "  Son  of  man "  constitutes  a  paradox.  Just  as 
the  idea  of  the  Kingdom  points  to  a  transcendent 
order  of  things  which,  though  future,  is  none  the  less 
actually  present ;  ^  so  the  correlative  name  of  Son  of  man 
embraces  likewise  the  "  hereafter "  and  the  "  here,"  Its 
point  of  departure  is  the  thought  of  coming  glory,  but 
that  eventual  triumph  is  mediated  through  suffering  and 
death.  It  unites  anticipation  with  reality.  Yet  this 
seeming  contradiction  is  vital  to  the  inward  spiritual 
coherence  of  the  idea.  It  is  through  indignity  and  pain 
and  death  that  He  who  must  reign  passes  to  His  Kingdom. 
As  it  has  been  put :  "  The  '  Son  of  man,'  in  the  mature 
mind  of  Jesus,  is  the  Person  who  unites  a  career  of  utmost 
service  and  suffering  with  a  sure  prospect  of  transcendent 
glory.  And  herein  we  touch  at  once  the  depth  and  height 
of  His  originality."  2  The  work  of  Jesus,  in  a  large 
measure,  came  to  consist  in  training  the  disciples  to  under- 
stand this  novel  thought  of  Messiahship,  to  perceive  and 
appreciate  inwardly  the  mystery  of  the  fact  that  "  not  in 
spite  of  His  death,  but  in  and  through  His  death.  He  was 
to  assert  Himself  as  Son  of  man."  ^  When  therefore 
they  at  length  seized  His  drift,  what  their  minds  fixed  upon 
as  forming  the  vital  content  of  the  title  He  had  chosen 
was  the  Divine  destiny  which  lay  veiled  in  the  future,  and 

^  Kaftan  has  put  it  excellently  :  "  Only  a  paradoxical  formula  will  cover 
the  ascertained  historical  facts.  It  must  run  thus — The  future  salvation  is 
becoine  present,  yet  has  not  ceased  to  be  future  "  {Jesus  und  Paulus,  24). 

^  Muirhead,  Eschatology  of  Jesus,  203. 

^  Scott,  The  Kingdom  and  the  Messiah,  243. 


THE   NAME    "SON    OF    GOD "  25 

the  experience  of  self-sacrifice  through  whicli  it  must  needs 
be  attained.  The  Son  of  man  must  suffer  many  things 
ere  He  comes  with  the  clouds  of  heaven. 

The  last  of  the  special  titles  predicated  of  Jesus  in 
the  Synoptics  is  "  Son,"  or,  in  its  fuller  form,  "  Son  of 
God."  We  cannot,  of  course,  ascribe  precisely  the  same 
meaning  to  every  instance  of  its  use.  In  the  lips  of  the 
possessed  (Mk  3^^),  of  unbelieving  Jews  (Mt  27*o),  of  the 
centurion  at  the  cross  (Mk  15=^^),  and,  by  implication,  of 
Caiaphas  (Mt  2Q^^),  it  obviously  carries  something  less 
than  its  full  significance.  From  the  words  of  the  centurion, 
"  Truly  this  man  was  a  son  of  God,"  we  may  judge  that 
he  found  in  our  Lord  a  man  of  such  sublime  courage  and 
righteousness  as  indicated  a  greatness  more  than  human. 
How  near  this  poetic  or  symbolic  usage  may  have  ap- 
proached to  theological  conviction,  it  is  less  easy  to  deter- 
mine. But  in  the  majority  of  cases  belonging  to  this  class, 
our  wisest  course  is  to  regard  "  Son  of  God  "  as  a  synonym 
of  Messiah.  Even  when  at  the  baptism  a  Divine  voice 
hailed  Jesus  as  "  My  beloved  Son,"  wiiat  stands  out  most 
clearly  is  His  consecration  to  the  Messianic  task. 

In  the  Old  Testament,  we  may  note,  the  title  "  Son  of 
God"  is  given  a  varied  application — to  angels,  to  the 
chosen  people,  to  the  theocratic  king  who  reigns  over  and 
represents  them,  to  the  Messianic  Deliverer  of  the  future. 
The  promise  to  David  concerning  Solomon  is  most  typical : 
"  I  will  establish  the  throne  of  his  kingdom  for  ever ;  I  will 
be  his  father,  and  he  shall  be  My  son"  (2  S  7^^-^^).  In 
this  passage  and  others  like  it,  the  name  guarantees  to  its 
bearer  the  special  protection  and  love  of  God,  a  relation- 
ship which  in  Ps  2  is  actually  represented  under  the 
symbol  of  paternity.  The  outer  side  of  the  relation  was 
represented  by  the  certain  possession  of  Divine  glory  and 
power ;  the  inner  consisted  in  the  peculiar  enjoyment  of 
His  love  as  its  chosen  object.  'v 

It  was  primarily  on   this  inner   aspect  that  the  mind     / 
of  Jesus  dwelt.      Nowhere  in  the  Synoptic  records  does  / 

/ 


26  THE    PERSON   OF   JESUS    CHRIST 

He  adopt  for  Himself  the  fully-phrased  name  "  Son  of 
God,"  perhaps  as  finding  in  it  a  too  familiar  designa- 
tion of  the  Messiah,  or  one  too  certain  to  evoke  political 
expectations.  Everything  goes  to  prove  that  His  supreme 
conception  of  His  own  person  was  expressed  simply  in 
the  name  "  Son."  Not  merely  does  it  occur  in  two  ex- 
ceptionally striking  words,  of  indubitable  authenticity 
(Mt  1127,  Mk  13^^  cf.  8=^0;  certain  other  pieces  of 
indirect  evidence  bear  directly  on  the  same  point.  Such 
are,  for  instance,  a  veiled  allusion  to  His  special  Sonship 
in  the  parables  of  the  Vineyard  and  the  Marriage  Feast ; 
His  question  to  Peter  about  the  taxing  of  kings'  sons ; 
and  His  conversation  with  the  scribes  as  to  the  relation 
between  David's  Son  and  David's  Lord.  We  may  perhaps 
catch  the  tone  of  unique  filial  self-consciousness  in  His 
custom  of  naming  God  the  "  Lord  of  heaven  and  earth," 
but  never  His  Lord.  However  this  may  be,  no  one  can 
miss  the  significance  of  the  name  "  My  Father "  so 
frequently  applied  by  Him  to  God  (Mt  T^i  lO^^  12^0 
etc.) ;  a  deliberate  and  selected  phrase  which  sets  His 
personal  relation  to  the  Father  in  a  distinct  place  by 
itself.  No  parallels  from  pagan  thought  are  of  the  least 
use  in  illustrating  this ;  the  Hellenic  conception  of  the 
Divine  Fatherhood,  for  example,  starts  not  from  ethical 
but  from  cosmic  presuppositions.  Nor  is  any  real 
equivalent  to  be  found  in  the  religion  of  the  Old  Testa- 
ment. If  ethnic  ideas  leant  with  more  or  less  decision 
to  a  naturalistic  pantheism,  Judaism  had  long  stood  in 
peril  of  the  petrifying  rigidities  of  deism.  Jesus'  incom- 
municable consciousness  of  filial  oneness  with  the  Eternal 
is  a  new  thing  in  the  world. 

Li  his  second  chapter,  Luke  represents  the  conscious- 
ness of  this  unique  Sonship  as  already  present  at  twelve 
years  (2^^^^-).  There  can  be  little  doubt  that  from  this 
indication  and  others  we  are  justified  in  concluding  that 
Jesus  knew  Himself  Son  before  His  call  to  the  Messiah- 
ship,  The  sense  that  His  life  flowed  from  God  directly, 
having  in  Him  all  its  well-springs,  laid  upon  Him  more 


JESUs'    FILIAL    CONSCIOUSNKSS  27 

commanding  obligations  than  those  of  earthly  affection. 
In  the  narrative  as  it  stands  there  is  no  suggestion  that 
the  episode  formed  the  birth-hour  of  Jesus'  special  con- 
sciousness of  God  and  Himself ;  one  is  rather  led  to  think 
of  processes  only  now  becoming  visible  upon  the  surface^ 
The  grace  by  which  He  lived  brooded  over  His  develop- 
ment. As  He  stands  in  the  Temple,  not  answering 
questions  merely  but  asking  them,  the  curtain's  edge  is 
for  a  moment  lifted  from  a  hidden  life  which  we  must 
conceive  of  as  sustained  and  informed  perpetually  by  the 
clear  knowledge  that  the  Father  and  He  belonged  wholly 
to  each  other.  To  Him  the  word  came  unceasingly  :  "  Son, 
Thou  art  ever  with  me,  and  all  that  I  have  is  Thine." 

But  the  study  of  our  Lord's  filial  consciousness  must 
always  centre  in  the  great  words  of  Mt  11-'':  "All  things 
are  delivered  unto  Me  of  My  Father ;  and  no  one  knoweth 
the  Son,  save  the  Father ;  neither  doth  any  know  the 
Father,  save  the  Son,  and  he  to  whomsoever  the  Son 
willeth  to  reveal  Him."  ^  These  words,  the  most  im- 
portant for  Christology  in  the  New  Testament,  were 
apparently  spoken  on  the  return  of  the  disciples  from 
their  first  preaching  mission.  They  are  instinct  with  a 
high  and  solemn  joy.  As  commentators  have  remarked, 
the  whole  passage  has  a  Johannine  quality  which  is 
unique,  or  all  but  unique,  in  the  first  three  Gospels.  The 
words  come  home  to  us  not  so  much  a«  the  sudden  flash 
of  a  transient  emotion  as  rather  the  overflow  of  an  habitual 
mood  of  feeling.  To  question  their  authenticity  is  a 
desperate  expedient,  and  it  is  difficult  to  take  seriously 
the  insipid  suggestion  that  they  are  more  than  half  a 
quotation  from  the  Son  of  Sirach.  What  it  is  of 
supreme  moment  for  us  to  note  is  "  the  unqualitied 
correlation  of  the  Father  and  the  Son  "  these  words  pro- 
claim. We  are  brought  face  to  face  with  a  relationship 
of  absolute  intimacy  and   perfect  mutual  correspondence, 

'  On  Harnack's  argument  in  favour  of  tlie  "Western"  text,  so  far  as  it 
changes  the  present  {ewiyivuiaKei)  into  the  aorist  {^yvw),  see  Denney,  Jesus 
and  the  Gosjel,  272  tf.  ;  Kiihl,  Das  S'elhstheifusstseiu  Jesu,  21  ff.  ^^ 


28  THE    PERSON    OF    JESUS    CHRIST 

which  is  intransferable  by  its  nature.  Not  merely  is  the 
Father's  being,  to  its  inmost  secret,  open  to  the  soul  of 
Jesus,  without  that  sense  of  mystery  and  inscrutable 
remoteness  of  which  the  greatest  prophets  had  been 
conscious ;  not  merely  is  the  Son's  knowledge  of  the 
Father  complete,  final,  and  inaccessible  to  every  other 
save  those  to  whom  the  Son  is  mediator :  along  with  this 
goes  the  fact  that  Jesus'  inmost  being  is  known  to  the 
Father,  and  to  none  else.  "  Between  Jesus  and  God,  one 
may  say,  all  is  common."  ^  This  is  not  to  repudiate  Old 
Testament  revelation  as  worthless ;  it  is  to  declare  that 
nothing  which  can  be  called  revelation  of  the  Father  is 
worthy  to  compare  with  the  knowledge  given  in  and 
through  the  Son.  The  revealing  medium  has  an  absolute 
and  exclusive  harmony  with  that  which  is  revealed.  All 
others  become  children  of  God  by  way  of  debt  to  Jesus ; 
in  His  case  alone  Souship  is  the  constitutive  factor  of 
His  being.  The  life  of  the  Father  and  the  Son  is  one 
life,  and  either  can  be  known  only  in  the  other.  In 
these  inexhaustible  words,  accordingly,  there  is  presented 
something  far  greater  than  a  new  conception ;  the  con- 
ception is  expressive  of  a  new  fact  beyond  which  religion 
cannot  go,  for  "  the  sentence  as  a  whole  tells  us  plainly 
that  Jesus  is  both  to  God  and  to  man  what  no  other  can 
be."  ^  It  was  a  final  intimation  of  truth  which  the 
apostles  kept  ever  after  in  their  heart.  Never  again 
could  they  attempt  to  realise  the  Divine  Fatherhood  but 
there  rose  before  them  the  person  of  the  Son,  as  life  and 
death  had  revealed  Him ;  in  like  manner,  to  possess  the 
Son  was  literally  to  possess  the  Father  also.  Looking 
both  at  Jesus'  own  mind  and  at  Christian  experience, 
there  is  no  reason  why  we  should  not  use  the  word  meta- 
physical to  denote  this  special  Sonship,  not  as  though 
metaphysical  stood  in  contrast  with  ethical,  but  to  mark 
the  circumstance  that  this  Sonship  is  part  of  the  ultimate 
realities  of  being, 

^  Goguel,  L'cqMre  Paul  et  J6sus-Christ,  199. 
*  Denney,  o;;.  cit.  272. 


7 


SONSHIP    AND    KNOWLEDGE    OF    GOD  20 

Harnack  has  unduly  niiuimised  this  aspect  of  the  truth 
in  his  too  categorical  statement  that  "  the  name  of  Son 
means  nothing  but  the  knowledge  of  God."  ^  Jesus' 
relation  to  God,  he  urges,  consists  merely  in  the  fact 
that  He  knows  God  thus  and  thus,  that  He  has  come  to 
recognise  the  sacred  Being  who  rules  heaven  and  earth  as 
Father,  as  His  Father.  Yet  we  may  not  thus  reduce 
what  is  evidently  presented  as  a  mutual  unity  of  life  to 
a  phenomenon  of  religious  knowledge ;  and  if  Jesus  could 
declare  (Mk  13^-)  that  He  stands  closer  to  God  than  even"^ 
the  angels,  whose  nature  is  heavenly,  it  is  scarcely  credible  ' 
that  in  ]\It  11-"  He  is  not  claiming  a  place  in  an  order 
of  things  far  transcending  all  mundane  relationships.^ 
Knowledge  of  God,  moreover,  in  Harnack's  sense,  is  some- 
thing which  begins  to  be ;  if  Sonship,  then,  is  constituted 
by  this  knowledge,  it  also  must  begin  to  be ;  but  can  it  be 
reasonably  held  that  Jesus  would  have  confessed  His  filial 
relationship  with  God  to  be  a  fact  of  temporal  origin  ? 
I  cannot  think  so.  Every  attempt  to  conceive  of  Him  "y 
as  becoming  the  Son  of  God  makes  shipwreck  on  the, 
unconditioned  character  of  His  self-consciousness.  It  is 
quite  in  accord  with  this  that  the  Jesus  of  the  Synoptics 
nowhere  affirms  His  pre-existence.  He  simply  refers  the 
origin  and  secret  of  His  personality  to  the  perfect  love 
of  God,  His  mind  moving  always  within  the  limits  of  the 
human  fact.  For  deeper  truth,  if  deeper  truth  can  be 
expressed  in  speech,  we  must  turn  to  the  Fourth  Gospel. 

On  a  careful  estimate,  our  results  up  to  and  including 
this  point  are  these :  Neither  in  the  self-disclosure  of 
Jesus  nor  in  the  faith  of  disciples  have  we  encountered 
anything  which  could  even  plausibly  be  described  as  a 
theory  of  incarnation,  or  of  two  natures  hypostatically 
united  in  a  single  person.  The  Christology  of  Jesus  and 
His  followers  yields  rather  the  yncture  of  One  who  by 
a  career  of  faith,  service,  and  mighty  works — a  career 
culminating  in  death — is  cognizable  as  the  perfect  revela- 

'  IVliat  is  Christianity?  128. 

*  Of.  Titius,  Jesu  Lehre  vom  Reich  Gottes,  118. 


30  THE    PERSON    OF    JESUS    CHRIST 

tion  of  the  Father  and  the  destined  Sovereign  of  the 
world.  The  terms  of  description  are  so  far  immanent, 
while  yet  it  is  clear  that  His  consciousness  of  unique  Son- 
ship  lifts  Him  beyond  the  plane  of  normal  human  life.  By 
His  chosen  name  of  Son  He  proclaims  what  He  is  to  God 
and  for  God ;  of  the  fact  that  He  occupies  this  place  no 
doctrinal  interpretation  is  offered,  nor  is  the  fact  analysed 
in  its  eternal  implications,  before  and  after.  These  im- 
plications, we  ouglit  to  note,  are  neither  denied  nor  asserted  ; 
and  it  is  quite  conceivable,  even  from  the  present  stand- 
point, that  they  may  yet  emerge  as  welcome  or  even 
necessary  elements  of  deeper  Christian  thought.  There  are, 
to  say  the  least,  points  of  attachment  for  what  apostles  may 
yet  divine  as  to  the  pre-existent  glory  of  "  the  Son "  or 
"  Word  "  and  His  place  within  the  Godhead.  Nevertheless, 
it  remains  true  that  the  self-consciousness  of  Jesus  was,  in 
the  main,  historically  conditioned.  When  He  spoke  of 
Himself  as  Son  par  excellence,  the  name  indicated  a  perfect 
and  redemptive  filial  life  which  took  shape  and  form  in 
uncloudc'l  fellowship  and  ethical  solidarity  with  the  Father. 
For  the  mind  of  Jesus  this  unshared  Sonship  is  the 
supreme  reality.  All  other  facts  concerning  Him  receive 
from  it  their  whole  value  and  meaning.  In  particular,  it 
shed  a  revealing  light  on  His  personal  vocation.  It  was 
not  that  He  awoke  to  find  Himself  Messiah,  rising  after- 
wards on  this  stepping-stone  to  the  consciousness  of  Son- 
ship.  Exactly  the  reverse  is  the  truth  ;  He  was  Son  of  man, 
Messianic  Head  and  Sovereign  of  the  Kingdom,  in  virtue  of 
the  still  more  fundamental  conviction  that  He  was  Son  of 
God.^  This,  and  this  only,  interprets  to  us  such  things  as 
His  magisterial  criticism  of  the  Law  ;  and  makes  it  all  but 
impossible  to  believe  that  His  view  of  the  Kingdom  did  not 
quite  consciously  embrace  the  whole  world.     The  ground  of 

^  "  With  the  most  careful  and  revereut  application  of  psychological 
/  methods,  it  is  obvious  that  our's  Lord's  consciousness  of  Sonship  must 
have  preceded  in  time  His  consciousness  of  Messiahship,  must  indeed  have 
formed  a  stepping-stone  to  the  latter.  In  spite  of  all  that  has  been  deduced 
from  the  apocalyptic  and  dogmatic  Messianic  conceptions  of  the  times,  we 
must  assert  that  the  consciousness  of  Divine  Sonship  and  of  Messiahship 


AUTHORITY    CLAIMED    BY    JESUS  31 

His  vocation,  then,  lies  in  the  uniqueness  of  His  nature. 
Because  He  is  God's  Son,  He  does  and  can  do  God's 
work.  Yet  in  the  last  resort  these  two  are  inseparable. 
As  human  life  mounts  in  the  scale  of  greatness,  vocation 
and  personality  become  more  and  more  coincident ;  in  the 
case  of  Jesus  the  coincidence  was  absolute. 

Apart  from  these  select  titles  or  modes  of  self-descrip- 
tion, we  must  glance  at  the  evidence  contained  in  the 
Synoptic  Gospels  of  a  peculiar  and  indeed  unexampled 
authority  to  which  Jesus  habitually  laid  claim.  He 
assumed  a  place  within  the  relations  of  God  to  man,  as 
of  man  to  God,  which  none  but  He  could  occupy.  Thus 
it  is  not  too  much  to  say  that  He  Himself,  as  King, 
came  by  degrees  to  displace  the  Kingdom  as  the  main 
subject  of  His  teaching.  Meek  and  lowly  of  heart.  He 
yet  displayed  an  incomparable  majesty  of  bearing,  which  / 
gave  sanction  to  each  new  commandment  by  a  simple 
"  Verily,  I  say  unto  you."  This  elevation  of  tone  and 
mien  was  recognised  on  every  hand.  The  possessed,  the 
crowd  at  Nazareth,  the  Pharisees  of  the  capital.  His  own 
disciples — all  were  conscious  of  it.  But  more ;  the  utter 
loyalty  He  demanded  was  instinctively  accorded.  If  the 
claims  of  Jesus  to  personal  obedience  are  felt  to  be  amazing, 
not  less  wonderful  is  the  free  and  joyous  acquiescence  with 
which  men  responded  to  His  call. 

The  secret  of  this  overwhelming  impression  lay  not 
in  His  miracles,  obviously ;  for  according  to  Mark  His 
first  disciples  had  been  gained  ere  the  first  miracle  was 
wrought.  It  lay  rather  in  Himself.  Somehow  He  was 
able  to  impart  the  certainty  that  in  Him  men  were  face 
to  face  with  God.  In  His  voice  sounded  a  tone — we 
can  still  hear  it — of  boundless  and  unconditioned  power. 

could  not  have  existed  together  from  the  beginniDg  ;  for  the  consciousness  of 
Messiahship  never  meant  anything  else  for  our  Lord  than  a  consciousness 
of  what  He  teas  about  to  become.  In  His  soul  the  consciousness  of  what  He 
was  must  have  come  first,  and  only  when  this  had  attained  to  the  height 
of  consciousness  of  Sonship  could  the  tremendous  leap  be  taken  to  the  / 
consciousness  of  Messiahship  "  (Harnack,  Sayings  of  Jesus,  245-246).  / 


32  THE    PERSON    OF   JESUS    CHRIST 

Amongst  the  founders  of  religion  He  is  unique  in  the  fact 
that  His  claims  were  not  so  much  argued  as  presupposed. 
Without  explaining  His  title  or  reasoning  about  His  place 
as  Divine  Eedeemer,  He  announced  that  in  His  person  the 
saving  power  of  God  was  present ;  present  to  make  all 
things  new.  Never  does  He  refer,  like  the  Baptist,  to 
one  who  should  come  after  Him  and  complete  His  task. 
He  was  Lord,  not  only  of  all  things  for  the  Kingdom's 
sake,  but  of  the  very  Kingdom  as  such.  He  had  the  keys ; 
with  Him  it  rested  to  declare  for  men  the  conditions  of 
entrance.  How  completely  He  refused  to  be  one  in  a 
series  we  gather  most  clearly  from  His  attitude  to  the 
ancient  Law.  August  and  sacred  as  were  its  precepts,  He 
put  them  royally  aside,  setting  in  their  place  the  perfect 
principles  of  the  transcendent  Kingdom  over  which  He 
should  come  to  reign. 

In  recent  years  it  has  been  emphatically  denied  that 
Jesus  claimed  to  forgive  sin,  yet  on  grounds  which  must 
be  pronounced  insufficient.  To  the  guilty  who  sought  Him 
out.  His  presence  formed  the  medium  of  pardon.  Few 
episodes  are  more  obviously  authentic  than  the  healing  of 
the  paralytic  (Mk  2),  where  the  narrative  simply  falls  to 
pieces  if  we  strike  out  Jesus'  self-presentation  as  Forgiver. 
His  rejoinder  to  the  angry  protest  of  the  scribes  would 
be  pointless,  but  for  the  implied  assertion  that  His  gift 
of  pardon  was  as  real  and  as  immediately  verifiable  as  His 
gift  of  bodily  strength.  From  the  incidents  of  the  woman 
with  the  issue  of  blood  and  the  dying  malefactor,  it  appears 
that  our  Lord  frequently  made  use  of  this  power.  The 
significance  of  this  can  hardly  be  overestimated.  By 
coming  forward  as  incarnate  pardon  He  proclaimed  His 
ability  to  lead  the  sinful,  there  and  then,  into  the 
Father's  presence.  His  person,  as  they  saw  it,  was  a  sure 
guarantee  of  God's  mercy.  But  when  we  think  it  out, 
clearly  forgiveness  is  a  Divine  miracle,  something  which 
in  its  infinite  marvel  is  inexplicable  by  the  resources  of 
nature  or  humanity  ;  it  presupposes  the  very  grace  and 
might  of  the  Eternal.      By  the  claim  to  impart  peace  of 


JESUS    THE   JUDGE  33 

conscience,  therefore,  Jesus  laid  His  hand,  with  quiet 
assurance,  on  a  unique  prerogative.  And  by  its  exercise 
He  opened  the  Kingdom  of  heaven  to  believers. 

Jesus,  then,  was  habitually  conscious  that  in  His 
person  Divine  power  had  entered  the  world  for  the  accom- 
plishment of  all  that  can  be  called  salvation.  He  was  the 
Chosen  One,  by  whose  presence  evil  was  already  overcome 
in  principle ;  the  predicted  Deliverer  who  should  save 
many  by  His  death  ;  the  Victor  who  should  conquer  the 
last  enemy  by  rising  from  the  grave  and  in  due  time 
appear  in  glory  as  Judge  of  all  mankind.  His  claim  to  be 
Judge  in  the  great  future  has  occasionally  been  denied,  but 
in  one  who  knew  Himself  to  be  the  inaugurator  of  the  per- 
fect Messianic  age  it  is  in  fact  neither  novel  nor  incredible. 
One  who  remits  sins  on  earth  in  the  consciousness  that 
God's  holy  love  is  present  in  His  person,  may  well  dis- 
charge that  solemn  function  at  the  End.  Bousset  has 
argued  that  the  steps  are  even  yet  discernible  by  which 
the  later  Church  mounted  to  this  ascription  of  Judgeship ; 
but  it  may  be  pointed  out  that  even  in  the  most  primitive 
form  of  the  tradition — "  Whosoever  confesseth  Me  before 
men,  him  will  I  also  confess  before  My  Father  who  is  in 
heaven"  (Mk  10^"^) — Jesus  definitely  takes  a  place  as 
Intercessor  or  Advocate  in  the  heavenly  world  which  is 
certainly  not  less  superhuman  in  significance  than  the 
claim  to  be  final  Judge  of  men.  The  uniqueness  of  Jesus 
for  His  own  consciousness  could  not  be  more  startlingly 
demonstrated  than  by  this  fact,  that  He  who  forbade 
His  followers  to  judge  each  other  should  have  foretold 
that  He  Himself  will  judge  the  world. 

Thus  with  ever-increasing  power  it  was  borne  in  upon 
the  disciples  that  no  comparison  or  parallel  could  be  insti- 
tuted between  Jesus  and  the  great  figures  of  the  past.  No 
prophet  had  invited  men  to  confess  his  name ;  no  prophet 
had  declared  that  the  relation  of  men  to  himself  would 
fix  their  destiny  in  the  future  Kingdom  ;  no  prophet  had 
dared  to  say :  "  All  things  have  been  delivered  unto  Me 
of  My  Father."  For  these  great  souls  it  had  been  enough 
3 


34  THE    PERSON    OF   JESUS    CHRIST 

to  announce,  "  Thus  saith  the  Lord."  Jesus,  however,  as 
it  has  been  put,  "  knows  no  more  sacred  task  than  to  point 
men  to  His  own  Person."  ^  He  is  the  object  of  saving 
faith ;  this  we  may  conclude  with  whole-hearted  assur- 
ance, albeit  the  phrase  "  believe  in  Me  "  occurs  seldom  or 
never  in  the  Synoptics.^  No  serious  mind  will  miss  the 
significance  which  was  bound  to  be  assigned  to  such 
professions  by  all  who  gave  them  credit.  The  disciples 
could  not  but  have  their  own  thoughts  regarding  One  who 
made  such  claims  and  wielded  such  power  over  the  spirits 
of  men.  And  it  is  a  crucial  circumstance  that  Jesus,  who 
must  have  perceived  the  trend  of  their  reflections,  welcomed 
with  joy  the  absolute  religious  trust  and  incipient  worship 
of  the  Twelve. 

In  the  foregoing  pages  we  have  studied  the  main 
features  in  the  Synoptic  representation  of  Jesus  Christ. 
Our  materials  have  been  derived  partly  from  the  manifest 
self-consciousness  of  our  Lord,  partly  from  the  impression 
He  produced  on  other  minds.  As  regards  the  witness  of 
Jesus  to  Himself,  it  is  at  all  events  such  as  to  demonstrate 
the  futility  of  saying,  with  Bousset,  that  He  simply  ranks 
Himself  by  the  side  of  struggling  humanity,  or  with 
Wellhausen,  that  He  nowhere  assigns  a  central  place  to  His 
own  person.  So  far  from  this.  He  may  be  better  described 
as  having  identified  the  Gospel  with  Himself.^  Moreover, 
the   impression   made   by   Him  on   others  was    of    such   a 

ikind  that  far-reaching  questions  in  regard  to  His  ultimate 
identity  could  not  be  evaded ;  and  when  once  these  ques- 
tions as  to  what  lay  behind  His  redeeming  influence,  and 
explained  it,  had  been  asked,  it  was  inevitable  that  the 
attempt  should  be  made  to  furnish  an  intelligible  and 
coherent  answer.  This  answer,  as  it  took  shape  in  the 
apostolic  mind,  is  present  in  solution  in  the  Epistles  and 
the  Fourth  Gospel.  It  was  no  false  metaphysical  scent 
which  drew  St.  Paul  and   his  successors  into  the  difficult 

^  Herrmann,  Communion  with  frod,  93. 

2  Cf.  Feine,  Die.  Thcologie  d.  AT,  26-34. 

3  Cf.  Mk  8'^  "  Me  and  My  words." 


HIS   SINLESSNESS  35 

paths  of  Christological  rellectioii ;  it  was  a  resolute  en- 
deavour to  set  forth  convictions  which  had  been  borne 
into  their  hearts  witli  an  irresistive  force  of  evidence — the 
conviction,  above  all,  that  in  the  life  of  Jesus  God  had 
been  personally  present  in  their  midst.  The  question 
whether  they  were  well  or  ill  advised  in  their  affirmation 
of  His  Divine  being  is  one  which  necessarily  is  insoluble 
by  the  methods  of  historical  science.  Then  as  now, 
only  those  could  attain  to  evangelical  faith  in  the  God- 
head of  Jesus  who  knew  that  in  Him  they  had  met  with 
the  Father.  Nothing  but  irrefragable  religious  experience 
will  explain  the  amazing  fact  that,  without  a  tremor  of 
hesitation,  the  apostles  took  the  responsibility  of  asking 
men  to  believe  in  Christ  as  Son  of  God  from  all  eternity. 

NOTE   OX  THE  SINLESSNESS  OF  JESUS. 

The  testimony  to  Jesus'  sinlessness  which  may  be  gathered 
out  of  the  Epistles  rests  on  no  a  priori  dogma,  but  is  a  transcript 
of  convincing  facts  of  which  we  have  a  clear  view  in  the 
Synoptics.  Historical  argument  will  not  of  course  carry  us  all 
the  way,  yet  it  does  prove  that  Jesus  thought  of  Himself  as  sinless. 
It  also  permits  us  to  believe  that  in  affirming  His  sinlessness  the 
apostles  cannot  have  been  at  war  with  their  recollections  of  His 
life,  "  suppressing  defects  in  His  character  which  they  had 
observed,  or  acknowledgments  of  shortcoming  made  by  Himself."^ 

The  Synoptics  certainly  record  no  explicit  claim  to  moral 
purity  on  Jesus'  part ;  nothing  so  direct  as  the  question,  "  Which 
of  you  convicteth  Me  of  sin  ? "  ( Jn  8-"^).  But  neither  do  they 
anywhere  eulogise  Him  or  attempt  to  prove  His  innocence ; 
they  offer  simply  a  plain  tale  of  His  words  and  works.  Various 
minor  traits  of  bearing  and  conduct,  however,  reveal  undeni- 
ably His  own  conviction.  When  we  recollect  that  His  mission 
opened  with  a  call  to  repentance,  that  He  condemned  "the 
righteous "  unsparingly,  that  He  urged  personal  confession  on 
His  followers  yet  was  Himself  a  stranger  to  the  language  of 
contrition,  we  can  explain  this  only  by  the  supposition  that  He 
reckoned  Himself  inwardly  pure.  This  absence  from  the  mature 
mind  of  Jesus  of  any  consciousness  that  sin  had  tainted  Him  is 
^  Forrest,  Authority  of  Christ,  26, 


36  THE    PERSON   OF   JESUS    CHRIST 

the  really  decisive  fact.  He  stood  without  fear  or  shame  in  the 
light  of  God.  There  is  no  trace  of  healed  scars,  no  memories 
of  defeat.  He  was  no  penitent,  like  St.  Paul  or  Augustine, 
nor  does  He  confess  sin  when  He  is  dying.  Men  may  of  course 
be  sinful  unawares,  but  not  such  men  as  Jesus.  The  intense 
moral  pain  that  vibrates  in  His  rebuke  of  Peter  (Mt  IG^^)  implies 
an  exquisite  sensitiveness  to  the  presence  of  evil.  Not  only  so  ; 
as  Goguel  has  remarked,  a  personality  of  this  depth  and  ethical 
intensity,  had  He  felt  conscious  of  sin  in  even  the  slightest 
degree,  would  have  been  overwhelmed  by  feelings  of  poignant 
and  consuming  grief.^  Further,  in  view  of  the  obligation  resting 
on  Him  to  dispel  erroneous  impressions,  His  persistent  silence, 
notwithstanding  the  presence  within  Him  of  a  bad  conscience, 
would  have  been  the  last  hypocrisy.  Finally,  on  every  page  of 
the  Gospels,  we  encounter  such  imperial  demands  for  obedience, 
as  well  as  gracious  promises  of  help  and  pardon,  as  it  would  have 
been  an  enormity  for  a  sinful  man  to  utter. 

Traces  of  moral  imperfection  have  nevertheless  been  dis- 
covered at  various  points  in  His  career.  His  denunciation  of 
the  Pharisees  has  been  characterised  as  harsh  and  unfeeling; 
His  behaviour  to  His  mother  and  brethren  has  been  censured 
for  a  grave  lack  of  affection ;  and  to  some  His  cleansing  of  the 
Temple  has  appeared  as  a  blameworthy  excess  of  zeal.  Still 
more  graceless  accusations  have  been  based  on  other  narrated 
acts.  Most  readers  will  feel  that  His  conduct  on  each  of  the 
occasions  specified  is  a  quite  intelligible  manifestation  of  fidelity 
to  His  Messianic  task.  It  was  a  task  which  provoked  resistance, 
necessitating  counter-resistance  in  its  turn;  and  it  would  have 
been  a  vice  in  Jesus,  not  a  virtue,  to  shrink  from  the  painful  duty. 
Enough  that  such  a  one  as  He  was  conscious,  even  in  these  and 
similar  instances,  of  complete  adequacy  to  His  own  ideal. 

Against  the  view  that  Jesus  had  no  interior  experience  of 
sin,  it  is  illegitimate  to  urge  His  self-subjection  to  baptism.  For 
in  His  case  also  acceptance  of  the  rite  signified  the  definite  resolve 
to  associate  Himself  with  the  Messianic  community  in  expectation 
of  the  Kingdom  and  in  the  corresponding  passion  for  righteous- 
ness; but  while  for  the  people  the  advent  of  the  Kingdom 
demanded  penitence  and  the  abandonment  of  known  sin,  from 
Jesus  it  asked  self-consecration  to  the  Messianic  activity  by 
which  the  Kingdom  was  to  be  brought  in.  Jesus'  baptism,  in 
1  0}).  cit.  202. 


HIS    SINLESSNESS  37 

short,  formed  a  crucial  stage  in  Ilis  deepening  self-identification 
with  sinful  men — "a  great  act  of  loving  communion  with  our 
misery,"  as  it  has  been  described,  in  which  He  numbered  Him- 
self with  the  transgressors  and  took  all  their  burdens  as  His 
own.  More  difficulty  will  be  felt  in  interpreting  His  reply  to 
the  young  ruler,  whose  salutation,  "  Good  Master,"  He  waved  back 
with  the  uncompromising  rejoinder,  "  None  is  good  save  one, 
even  God"  (Mk  10^^).  The  words  cannot  be  a  veiled  confession 
of  moral  delinquency,  which  certainly  would  not  have  taken  this 
ambiguous  and  all  but  casual  form.  AVhat  Jesus  disclaims, 
rather,  is  GocVs  perfect  goodness.  None  but  God  is  good  with 
a  goodness  unchanging  and  eternal ;  He  only  cannot  be  temjited 
of  evil,  but  rests  for  ever  in  unconditioned  and  immutable 
perfection.  Jesus,  on  the  contrary,  learnt  obedience  by  the 
things  which  He  suffered,  being  tempted  in  all  points  like  as  we 
are  (He  5^  4^^).  In  the  sense  of  transcendent  superiority  to 
moral  conflict  and  the  strenuous  obligation  to  prove  His  virtue 
ever  afresh  in  face  of  new  temptation  and  difficulty,  He  laid  no 
claim  to  the  "  absolute  "  goodness  of  His  Father.  Which  reminds] 
us  emphatically  that  the  holmess  of  Jesus,  as  displayed  in  the  / 
record  of  His  life,  is  no  automatic  effect  of  a  metaphysical  sub-  / 
stance,  but  in  its  perfected  form  the  fruit  of  continuous  moral ' 
volition  pervaded  and  sustained  by  the  Spirit.  It  is  at  once 
the  Father's  gift  and  progressively  realised  in  an  ethical  experi- 
ence.    This  follows  from  the  moral  conditions  of  incarnation. 

It  may  also  be  held,  with  much  reason,  that  Jesus'  words  to 
the  young  ruler  must  be  interpreted  exclusively  in  the  light  of 
the  incident  itself.  In  that  case,  they  are  simply  meant,  like  so 
many  of  Jesus'  utterances,  to  throw  the  man  back  upon  his  own 
mind.  And  accordingly  they  cannot  be  relevantly  cited  in  a 
discussion  of  our  Lord's  sinlessness. 

For  some  recent  thinkers  the  concept  of  sinlessness  is  dis- 1 
qualified  by  its  unduly  negative  character,  and  they  accordingly  \/' 
propose  to  replace  it  by  the  idea  of  Jesus'  perfect  fidelity  to  His 
vocation.  Sinlessness,  if  predicated  of  a  child,  might  mean  no 
more  than  incapacity  for  conscious  transgression.  Now  not  only 
does  the  concept  of  fidelity  to  vocation  bring  out  a  characteristic  of 
fundamental  importance  in  Jesus'  personality,  but  several  New 
Testament  passages  usually  quoted  under  the  head  of  sinlessness 
might  be  still  more  fitly  placed  under  the  other  category  {e.(j. 
1  P  221,  pii  2'-  8,  1  Jn  3^).     Nevertheless,  the  specific  thought  of 


38  THE    PERSON    OF   JESUS    CHRIST 

sinlessness  is  one  whicli  we  cannot  afford  to  lose.  We  need  a  pre- 
dicate which  bears  directly,  not  merely  on  Jesus'  fulfilment  of  His 
task,  but  on  the  inner  life  which  made  this  fulfilment  possible — 
the  private  hidden  stream  of  thought,  feeling,  and  volition  which 
flowed  out  of  a  stainless  development  dating  from  very  birth. 
"In  a  so-called  civil  vocation,"  writes  Haering,  "it  is  possible 
to  be  faithful  apart  from  perfect  inward  purity ;  in  the  case  of 
Jesus  fidelity  was  possible  only  through  an  unperturbed  com- 
munion with  the  Father  in  the  hidden  deeps  of  the  heart."  ^ 

Such  moral  perfection  is  to  us  inexplicable ;  yet,  as  Mr. 
Bradley  has  said,  "  not  to  know  how  a  thing  can  be  is  no  dis- 
^  proof  that  the  thing  must  be  and  is."  Ethical  psychology,  based 
on  the  experience  of  sinners,  must  ever  find  sinlessness  a  mystery. 
We  are  sure  of  the  fact;  sure  also  that  the  fact  was  mediated  in 
ethical  and  spiritual  modes.  Jesus  alone  was  sinless,  because  He 
felt  as  we  do  not  the  powerlessness  and  insufficiency  of  the 
human  will  to  sustain  itself  in  goodness;  also  because  He  felt 
as  we  do  not  man's  sheer  dependence  on  the  Holy  Father  whose 
response  to  simple  and  complete  faith  passes  understanding. 
*  Der  christliche  Glmihe,  398. 


CHAPTER   II. 

PRIMITIVE  CHRISTIAN  BELIEF. 

The  initial  stage  of  primitive  Christian  thought  is  reflected 
most  typically  in  the  early  speeches  of  the  Book  of  Acts. 
Especially  in  their  Christology,  it  is  agreed,  these  Petrine 
sermons  are  of  the  highest  value,  containing  as  they  do 
precisely  the  kind  of  teaching  that  might  be  expected  from 
men  for  whom  the  resurrection  of  Jesus  had  created  a  new- 
world  of  feeling  and  anticipation.  We  can  see  the  apostolic 
mind  begin  to  adjust  itself  slowly  to  a  great  and  novel 
situation,  though  naturally  a  considerable  time  was  to 
elapse  before  an  effort  could  be  made  to  formulate  the 
doctrinal  conclusions  implied  in  their  practical  religious 
attitude. 

St.  Peter's  message  may  be  briefly  summarised  in  the 
statement  that  Jesus — a  person  well  known  to  his  Jewish 
hearers — is  the  Messiah ;  that  His  Messianic  dignity  has 
been  proved  by  resurrection  from  the  dead ;  and  that  He 
will  return  presently  to  bring  in  the  last  consummation. 
In  simple  outlines  he  pictures  the  Prophet  whom  their 
leaders  put  to  death.  "Jesus  of  Nazareth,"  we  read, 
"  a  man  approved  of  God  to  you  by  mighty  works 
and  wonders  and  signs,  which  God  did  by  Him  in  the 
midst  of  you"  (2^2),  by  the  side  of  which  we  may 
place  a  later  verse:  "God  anointed  Jesus  of  Nazareth 
with  the  Holy  Spirit  and  with  power:   who  went  about 

Literature— Weizsiicker,  Das  npnMoUsche  Zeitalter^,  1902  (Eng.  tr. 
1894-5) ;  McGiffert.  History  of  Chrislianitij  in  the  Apostolic  Age,  1897  ; 
Gunkel,  Die  Wirkungen  dcs  hcillgen  Gcisla?,  1908  ;  Spitta,  Christi  Predigt 
an  die  Geister,  1890  ;  Monuier,  La  premiere  ipitre  de  I'apdtre.  Pierre, 
1900  ;  Wernle,  Die  Anfange  unserer  Religion",  1904  (Eug.  tr.  1903-4). 


40  THE    PERSON    OF   JESUS    CHRIST 

doing  good,  and  healing  all  that  were  oppressed  of  the 
devil;  for  God  was  with  Him"  (lO^s).  But  this  Man 
whom  they  had  slain  is  now  vindicated  marvellously ; 
the  hopes  set  upon  Him  have  become  certainties.  As  we 
read  in  a  verse  the  importance  of  which  for  the  primitive 
Christology  we  cannot  overestimate :  "  God  hath  made 
Him  both  Lord  and  Christ,  this  Jesus  whom  ye  crucified  " 
(2^<^).  These  words  reveal  the  secret  of  the  new  faith. 
For  the  first  time  it  has  broken  on  human  minds  that 
Jesus  is  Lord.  It  is  by  resurrection  that  He  has  taken 
•<--'^is  place  openly  as  the  Christ.  We  need  not  interpret 
the  words  as  meaning  that  He  was  not  Messiah  previously, 
a  position  which  makes  a  chaos  of  the  Synoptic  narrative ; 
but  certainly  we  may  affirm  that  not  till  after  death  and 
resurrection  was  He  the  fully  manifested  Christ,  in  a 
perfect  manner  all  that  which  the  Christ  was  to  be.  This 
is  in  harmony  with  the  general  conviction  expressed 
throughout  the  New  Testament  (cf.  Ro  1*)  that  resurrection 
opens  a  new  transcendent  stadium  in  the  career  of  Jesus. 
He  was  the  Christ  even  during  His  lifetime  on  earth,  and 
was  acknowledged  in  that  character  by  faith ;  yet  His  true 
status  could  be  then  disclosed  only  in  a  restricted  and 
conditioned  measure.  "  The  fact  that  He  was  raised  from 
the  dead  did  not  make  Jesus  the  Christ;  but  it  showed 
Him  to  be  such."  ^ 

Thus  the  gospel  preached  by  St.  Peter  may  be  con- 
densed in  the  one  truth  that  Jesus,  crucified  and  risen,  is 
the  promised  Christ  of  God.  He  is  attested  by  miracles 
wrought  by  Himself  or  done  later  in  His  name,  but 
supremely  by  the  amazing  miracle  of  the  resurrection. 
This  appeal  to  Jesus'  miracles,  it  is  worth  noting,  is  the 

1  Mathews,  Messianic  Hope,  130.  The  name  of  J.  Weiss  is  prominently 
associated  with  the  opinion  that  for  the  primitive  faith  the  earthly  Jesus 
was  not  yet  Messiah,  but  even  he  is  unable  to  carry  through  so  drastic  an 
interpretation.  Thus  we  find  him  conceding  that  the  disciples  who  preached 
alter  Pentecost  "must  have  known  or  believed  that  Jesus  in  some  form  or 
other  regarded  Himself  as  the  fulfiUer  of  the  prophecy  (Dt  18^^),  the  final 
messenger  of  God  to  Israel,  in  some  sense  or  other  the  Messiah  "  {Chrid:  the 
Beginnings  of  Dogma,  23). 


EARLIEST    FORM    OF    DOCTRINE  41 

only  direct   and   concrete   allusion   to  the  events   of   His 
earthly    life.     Even    His     work     as     Teacher     is     barely 
mentioned  (1 O^*^).     The  speaker's  mind  is  drawn  irresistibly 
to  other   topics.     Less  than  we  might   have  expected   is 
said  as  to  the  bearing  of  Jesus'  death  on  the  forgiveness  of 
sins ;  though  His  death  is  described  freely  as  foreseen  and 
pre-ordained  of  God ;   and,  what  is  very  significant,  it  is 
distinctly  alleged  to  have  been  necessary,  presumably  as  a 
part  of  His  redeeming  work  (2^^).     But  what  absorbs  the 
preacher  is  Jesus'  deliverance  from  the  grave  and  entry 
into  glory.      "  This  Jesus  did  God  raise  up,"  he  declares, 
"whereof  we  all  are  witnesses"  (2^-).     He  is  speaking  not 
merely  in  view  of  the  resurrection  appearances,  but  in  the 
power  of  that  iuefiaceable  impression  left  by  Jesus  in  the 
long  intercourse  of  their  discipleship.      The  Easter  faith  is 
the  living  resultant  of  the  vision  of  the  Risen  One  acting 
on  and  harmonising  with   the  pure  and   sublime  image  of 
Jesus  which  had  been  stamped  upon  their  memory.     The 
hall-mark  of  New  Testament  religion,  faith  in  an  exalted 
Lord,  is  thus  shown  firm  and  clear  at  the  very  outset.     Men 
who  had  been  daily  in  Jesus'  company  knew  that  they 
were  still  in  relations  to   Him.     He  was  still  the   same 
Person  they  had  known  and  loved ;  death  and  resurrection 
had  not  impaired  His  individuality.     "  We  ate  and  drank 
with  Him  after  He  rose  from  the  dead"  (10").     Even  if 
a  saying  of    this  kind  may  reveal  traces  of   unconscious 
materialisation,  at  all  events  it  proves  how  different  the 
intercoiu'se  of  the  risen  Christ  with  His  followers  is  felt  to 
be  from  a  merely  subjective  and  transitory  vision.     As  it 
has    been    put:    "There    is   no  such  thing    in   the    New 
Testament  as  an  appearance  of  the  Eisen  Saviour  in  which 
He  merely  appears.     He  is  always  represented  as  entering 
into  relations  to  those  who  see  Him  in  other  ways  than  by 
a  flash  upon  the  inner  or  the  outer  eye :  He  establishes 
other  communications  between  Himself  and  His  own  than 
that  which  can  be  characterised    in  this  way."  ^     To  be 
related  thus  to  the  exalted  Lord  is  the  differential  feature 
^  Denney,  Death  of  Christ,  67. 


42  THE    PERSON   QF   JESUS    CHRIST 

of  Christianity.  His  presence  inspired  believers,  and  so 
trustfully  did  they  lean  on  it  that  death  was  nothing  more 
terrible  than  falling  asleep  (7^"). 

Various  epithets  have  been  appended  to  this  first  sketch 
of  Christological  doctrine.  By  some  writers  it  has  been 
roundly  described  as  humanitarian ;  but  every  sympathetic 
reader  must  feel  that  in  the  conceptions  of  "  Christ "  and 
"  Lord  "  there  lay  from  the  beginning  a  wealth  of  content 
and  of  implication  far  transcending  the  limits  of  mere  man- 
hood. Others,  in  view  of  a  passage  like  Ac  2^2-36^  prefer  to 
speak  of  it  as  Adoptionist ;  and  in  this  questionable  terminus 
technicus,  better  reserved  for  the  view  which  dates  Jesus' 
special  Sonship  from  the  baptism  at  the  Jordan,  there  is  at 
all  events  this  much  truth,  that  Jesus  is  represented  as 
entering  on  full  Messianic  dignity  at  the  resurrection,  and 
as  having  first  manifested  His  new  sovereign  power  by  the 
outpouring  of  the  Spirit.  But  a  better  adjective  than 
either  is  "  rudimentary."  The  total  absence  of  the  idea  of 
pre-existence,  for  example,  is  significant  for  the  theological 
naiveU  of  the  belief. 

At  the  same  time,  there  are  positive  features  which 
prove  that  Jesus  was  already  viewed  as  having  His  place 
somehow  within  the  sphere  of  Godhead.  To  be  raised  to 
God's  right  hand  is  to  participate  in  the  Divine  power  and 
glory.  The  gift  of  the  Spirit  is  bestowed  by  Him,  and 
this  Spirit  is  the  Spirit  of  God.  We  ought  not  to  forget 
that  this  claim  to  possess  the  Spirit  was  largely  an  appeal 
to  something  which  even  the  onlooker  could  recognise  and 
verify.  The  acceptance  of  Jesus  as  Christ  manifestly  led 
to  a  new  experience.  Spirit-filled  men  rose  up  to  proclaim 
a  gospel  of  salvation  from  sin,  death,  and  all  diabolic  powers, 
and  it  was  impossible  to  deny  that  their  inspiration  was 
really  due  to  their  connection  with  Jesus.  In  other 
ways  also  His  person  had  the  religious  value  of  God. 
Prayer  is  offered  to  Him  as  well  as  in  His  name,^  and  God 

^  7^^  ;  possibly  1^^  also,  for  just  before  St.  Peter  speaks  of  Him  as  Lord. 
Cf.  2  Co  12^,  Rev  5'*,  Jn  14'*'-,  and  on  the  wliole  subject  Zahn,  Skizzen 
aus  dem  Lchcn  der  alien  Kirche,  1894,  271  ff. 


PRAYER    TO    CTIRLST  43 

is  said  to  have  appointed  Him  judge  of  quick  and  dead. 
He  is  Himself  tlie  theme  of  gospel  preaching,  the  object  of 
faith,  the  source  of  penitence  and  forgiveness.  Over  and 
over  again.  His  name,  i.e.  His  person  as  revealed  and 
known,  is  proclaimed  as  sole  medium  of  redemption 
(238  316  412  1943)  ]Vj;ost  significant  of  all  is  His 
possession  of  the  title  "  Lord,"  a  familiar  Old  Testament 
designation  of  Jehovah.  In  the  same  way,  verses  from 
prophecy  or  psalm  which  at  first  referred  to  God  are 
applied  directly  to  Jesus,  and  the  conception  of  Him  as 
occupying  the  throne  of  Israel  is  merged  in  the  vaster 
thought  tliat  He  is  King  of  the  world.  As  Feine  has 
pointed  out,^  these  lofty  predicates  are  only  intelligible  if 
we  suppose  that  the  disciples  in  retrospect  were  conscious 
that  even  Jesus'  earthly  life  revealed  traces  of  His  higher 
being.  Even  then  He  had  been  anointed  with  the  Holy 
Spirit,  and  had  been  "  holy  and  just " ;  even  then  He  was 
known  by  the  sublime  name  of  the  "  Son  of  Man  "  (7^^). 
The  primitive  Christology  can  be  best  interpreted  as  the 
fruit  of  adoring  memory  quickened  by  the  experience  of  a 
risen  and  glorified  Eedeemer. 

We  are  now  in  a  position  to  consider  the  suggestion 
that  in  the  earliest  faith  two  forms  of  faith  in  Christ  went 
side  by  side,  in  peaceful  rivalry :  that  to  which  He  was 
but  a  prophet  and  forerunner,  and  that  to  which  He 
already  appeared  as  authentically  Divine  in  majesty  and 
redeeming  power.  If  this  means  that  these  forms  of 
Christological  belief  were  held  respectively  by  two  different 
groups  of  Christians,  it  must  be  said  at  once  that  so  far  as 
the  New  Testament  is  concerned  the  hypothesis  is  without 
foundation.  Both  estimates  were  held  by  all  Christians. 
Jesus  was  indeed  "  a  prophet  miglity  in  word  and  deed  " 
(Lk  24^^),2  but  also  from  the  very  outset  He  was  the 
Messiah-King  who  had  been  vindicated  by  His  rising  from 
the  dead  and  reception  of  universal  authority.     From  which 

'  Thrologie  d.  NT,  203. 

^  The  term  wah  (3'^,  4-'')  is  "  Srrvant"  rather  than   "Son,"  and  all  but 
certainly  contains  an  allusii  n  to  Is  !'>■). 


44  THE    PERSON   OF   JESUS    CHRIST 

we  may  draw  two  inferences :  first,  that  the  difference  of 
view  between  St.  Paul  and  the  primitive  apostolic  society 
was  not  one  of  principle,  but  of  degree,  since  the  risen 
Jesus  was  never  regarded  as  an  ordinary  man.  And 
secondly,  that  it  is  needless  to  have  recourse  to  a  supposed 
"  Messianic  dogmatic "  for  the  august  epithets  from  the 
first  attributed  to  Christ.  They  are  sufficiently  accounted 
for  by  the  appearances  of  the  risen  Lord. 

This  primitive  conception  of  Christ  is  pervaded  by 
an  intense  eschatological  feeling.  While  it  is  an  exaggera- 
tion to  speak  of  Jesus'  earthly  life  as  being  for  St.  Peter 
no  more  than  "  a  preliminary  career,"  yet  there  is  certainly 
a  startling  preoccupation,  or  rather  absorption,  of  mind  in 
the  hope  of  the  Parousia,  which  may  break  on  the  world 
any  moment.  The  impending  return  of  the  Messiah  is  the 
keynote  of  the  whole.  "  Eepent  ye,  therefore,  and  turn 
again  .  .  .  that  He  may  send  the  Christ  who  hath  been 
appointed  for  you,  even  Jesus"  (3^^- 2°).  The  period  of 
waiting  will  be  short.  Men  still  think  in  the  forms  of 
national  Messianism. 

Into  these  forms,  however,  rudimentary  though  they 
be,  a  new  and  infinite  content  has  been  poured.  We  find, 
indeed,  scarcely  an  effort  to  create  a  system  of  conceptions 
adequate  to  the  revolutionising  expeiience  through  which 
the  witnesses  of  the  glorified  Lord  had  passed.  Doctrine 
could  not  begin  till  men  had  first  lived  themselves  into  the 
new  thought  of  Christ.  But  already  their  attitude  is  that 
of  faith  and  worship.  Jesus'  nature  is  seen  to  be  universal 
and  absolute  in  the  sense  that  everything  wliich  can  be 
called  salvation  is  mediated  by  His  power.  Exaltation 
has  set  free  His  influence  from  all  limits,  whether  of  place 
or  time ;  He  is  now  available  everywhere  and  always.  It 
could  only  be  a  question  of  time  until  a  theological  master- 
mind should  rise  to  set  forth  the  unsuspected  significance 
of  these  elemental  facts  of  faith  and  life. 

Turning  now  to  the  First  Epistle  of  Peter,  we  find  a 
writer  who  is  interested,  it  may  be  fairly  said,  rather  in 


FIRST    EPISTLE    OF   PETER  45 

the  salviition  accomplished  by  Christ  than  in  theoretical 
problems  relating  to  His  person.  The  Epistle,  like  the 
speeches  in  Acts,  rests  on  and  revolves  round  the  contrast 
of  the  passion  of  Jesus  with  His  present  sovereignty,  "  tlie 
sufferings  of  Christ  and  the  glories  that  should  follow " 
(1^^).  In  both  the  evidence  of  Old  Testament  prophecy  is 
appealed  to,  and  more  than  once  the  same  quotations 
occur.  Both  emphasise  the  Divine  fore-ordination  of  the 
Cross ;  both  refer  to  the  sinless  perfection  of  the  self- 
sacrificing  Victim.  We  may  gather  the  writer's  favourite 
thought  of  Christ  from  the  fact  that  "  Jesus  "  is  never  used 
by  itself,  while  "  Christ "  has  become  a  proper  name. 
Weiss  is  probably  correct  in  explaining  this  as  "  due  to  the 
fact  that  the  person  of  Jesus  is  contemplated  by  the 
Christian  always  and  exclusively  in  His  specific  quality 
as  Mediator  of  salvation."  ^  It  is  a  point  in  Christology 
where  a  slight  change  of  accent  has  taken  place  as 
contrasted  with  the  Petrine  speeches. 

Is  there  a  further  advance  in  1^^  ?  When  it  is  said 
that  the  Spirit  of  Christ  in  the  prophets  "  testified  before- 
hand to  the  sufferings  of  Christ,"  and  in  a  related  verse 
(1^°)  that  Christ  "was  foreknown  indeed  before  the 
foundation  of  the  world,  but  was  manifested  at  the  end  of 
the  times  for  your  sake,"  may  we  conclude  that  the  writer 
believed  in  the  pre-existence  of  Christ  ?  The  arguments  on 
either  side  will  be  found  in  the  commentaries ;  here  it  can 
only  be  said  that  the  language  of  1^^  by  itself  apparently 
means  no  more  than  that  the  Divine  Spirit,  now  so  much 
identified  with  Christ  as  properly  to  be  called  His  Spirit, 
moved  also  in  the  prophets  of  old  time.  The  principle  of  life 
and  power  that  filled  the  manifested  Christ  was  operative 
even  prior  to  His  coming.  But  on  this  view  the  passage 
after  all  marks  a  stage  towards  the  full  assertion  of  pre- 
existence,  though  it  does  not  assert  it  quite  directly.  The 
Spirit  in  which  the  inmost  being  of  Jesus  was  constituted  had 
pointed  on  to  the  sufferings  that  befell  Him.  On  the  other 
hand,  l^*^  is  distinctly  more  significant.  While  the  word 
*  Biblical  Theology  of  the  New  Testament,  i.  226. 


46  THE    PERSON    OF    JESUS    CHRIST 

"  foreknown "  (Trpoejvoia/xevov)  in  no  way  involves  the 
pre-existence  of  Christ,  since  it  is  used  even  of  Christians 
in  1^  yet  the  unusual  combination  of  "  foreknown "  with 
"  manifested "  may  justly  be  considered  as  placing  the 
matter  beyond  doubt.  Only  that  can  be  manifested  which 
was  in  being  before  manifestation.  Thus,  even  though  the 
point  is  not  insisted  on,  the  person  of  Christ  is  already  lifted 
clear  of  the  contingencies  of  time,  viewed  as  the  embodi- 
ment of  a  Divine  Spirit,  and  given  a  place  within  the 
redeeming  world-plan  of  God.  More  and  more  the 
historical  is  being  fused  with  the  eternal. 

The  Christ  so  characterised,  then,  was  revealed  in  the 
last  times.  We  have  a  vague  hint  as  to  the  constitution 
of  His  person  in  the  difficult  phrase  (3^^),  "  being  put  to 
death  in  the  flesh,  but  quickened  in  the  spirit " ;  where 
the  two  datives  (aapKi  and  Trvev/jbari)  are  exactly  parallel. 
The  flesh  is  the  sphere  or  element  in  which  death  took 
place ;  similarly,  the  spirit  is  the  sphere  of  resurrection, 
the  element  of  life  that  made  it  possible.  In  virtue  of 
one  aspect  of  His  being,  Christ  died ;  in  virtue  of  the  other 
and  higher,  He  was  raised  again. ^  The  verse  at  first 
sight  comes  very  near  to  the  orthodox  doctrine  of  the  Two 
Natures ;  what  it  really  does,  however,  is  to  contemplate 
the  personality  of  Christ  from  two  different  points  of  view, 
as  capable  of  death  on  the  one  hand,  and  on  the  other  of 
resurrection.  Spirit  means  here  the  Divine  vital  principle, 
in  a  higher  potency  than  it  attains  in  man,  and  thus 
characterised  by  an  essential  and  indestructible  energy. 
The  evidence  that  Christ's  spirit  was  laden  with  vast 
abnormal  powers  is  that  "  He  went  and  preached  unto  the 
spirits  in  prison "  (3^^  4*^).  Whatever  this  means,  it 
proclaims  that  wherever  men  are,  Christ  can  save.  Even 
in  the  region  of  the  dead  He  must  have  manifested  His 
power.^  Formerly,  in  Ac  2^*,  the  ground  of  Jesus' 
resurrection  had  been  found  merely  in  Old  Testament 
prediction,  but  now  the  step  is  taken  of  attributing  it  to 

^  In  a  sense  Ro  !■*•  **  may  be  compared. 
^  Cf.  Denney,  Jfsus  and  the  Gospel,  48, 


THK    SPIRIT   OF    CHRIST  47 

the  energies  inherent  in  His  nature  and  due  to  the  unction 
of  the  Messianic  Spirit. 

We  are  entitled  to  say,  I  think,  in  view  of  these  data, 
that  First  Peter  exhibits  a  form  of  Christology  sL'ghtly 
more  developed  than  that  of  the  first  chapters  of  Acts. 
Yet  its  tone  is  thoroughly  primitive ;  there  is  nothing  in 
the  way  of  precise  analysis  or  speculation.  If  the  epistle 
was  written  by  St.  Peter,  as  it  may  well  have  been,  we 
must  recollect  that  a  man  of  his  type  would  probably  care 
little  for  reasoned  theories  regarding  the  loved  person  of 
His  Lord.  He  lived  amid  the  memories  of  the  past  and 
the  ardent  hopes  of  a  near  and  glorious  future. 

Nevertheless,  there  can  be  no  reasonable  doubt  that  he 
shared  the  specifically  Christian  estimate  of  Jesus.  The 
Spirit  of  God,  as  we  have  seen,  is  definitely  spoken  of  as 
"  the  Spirit  of  Christ  " — in  itself  an  amazing  fact.  "  Son  of 
God "  is  nowhere  used,  but  we  meet  with  the  significant 
and  full-toned  phrase,  "  the  God  and  Father  of  our  Lord 
Jesus  Christ"  (1^),  with  an  undeniable  implication  of 
Christ's  special  Sonship.  The  declaration  that  angels  and 
authorities  are  subject  to  Him  (322)  does  more  than  assert 
His  risen  glory  ;  it  affirms  that  He  is  personally  participant 
in  the  sovereignty  of  God,  whom  angels  serve  as  messengers. 
The  somewhat  unusual  phrase,  "  Sanctify  in  your  hearts 
Christ  as  Lord  "  (S^^),  echoes  Is  8^^  where  "  Lord "  has 
reference  to  Jehovah.  And  in  4^^  we  read :  "  Throuo-h 
Jesus  Christ,  whose  is  the  glory  and  the  dominion  for  ever 
and  ever."  The  balance  of  the  verse  is  in  favour  of  an 
interpretation  which  ascribes  the  doxology  to  Christ,  but 
in  the  last  chapter  (5")  virtually  the  same  form  is  used 
in  reference  to  "  the  God  of  all  grace." 

^  Details  of  this  kind  can  never  be  quite  conclusive,  but 
at  all  events  they  mark  with  some  clearness  the  direction 
of  the  stream.  The  primitive  apostolic  Christology  lays 
due  stress  on  the  subordination  of  Jesus  Christ  to  God  the 
Father,  while  yet  already  He  begins  to  fill  the  sphere 
of  the  Divine.  He  is  believed  in  with  adoring  trust,  as 
monotheists   can   believe   in  none    but    God.      If    this    is 


48  THE    PERSON    OF   JESUS    CHRIST 

the  attitude  taken  by  men  of  mispeculative  minds,  the 
fact  is  only  the  more  full  of  suggestion.  It  implies 
that  the  normally  Christian  intelligence  cannot  refrain 
from  predicating  of  Jesus  Christ  the  religious  value 
of  God.  Not  metaphysics  in  the  wrong  place,  but  faith 
conscious  of  its  own  significance  and  therefore  reaching 
out  to  a  clear  expression  of  its  proper  content,  has  been 
responsible  for  the  high  Christology  to  be  found  even  in 
the  first  origins  of  our  religion.^ 

^  Tlie  materials  for  an  exhaustive  treatment  of  the  primitive  Christology 
would  of  course  have  to  be  drawn  also  from  St.  Paul  {e.g.  1  Co  15^ ''^•)  and 
the  synoptic  Gospels.  But  I  have  nnt  entered  on  this  field,  my  object 
being  merely  to  sketch  the  main  distinguishable  types  of  Christology  present 
in  the  New  Testament. 


CHAPTER    TIL 

THE  CHRISTOLOGY  OF  ST.  PAUL. 

In  the  following  statement  of  St.  Paul's  view  of  Christ 
it  has  not  been  thought  necessary  to  make  a  sharp  dis- 
tinction between  the  four  great  Epistles — to  the  Galatians, 
Eomaus,  and  Corinthians — and  the  later  group,  known  as 
the  Epistles  of  the  Imprisonment.  For  one  thing,  excel- 
lent critical  opinion  may  be  quoted  for  the  statement  that 
all  the  Imprisonment  Epistles  are  genuine,  so  that  post- 
Pauline  developments,  say  in  Ephesians,  need  not  so  far  be 
allowed  for.  Moreover,  if  we  have  already  in  Eo  9^ — and 
perhaps  even  in  2  Th  1^^ — ^  an  explicit  assertion  of  Christ's 
deity,  it  is  plain  that  quite  early  the  apostle  had  expressed  an 
estimate  of  our  Lord's  being  beyond  which  it  was  impossible 
to  go,  and  we  may  discount  the  hypothesis  that  in  his  later 
years  he  gave  himself  up  to  unbridled  and  fantastic  specu- 
lation, of  a  sort  wholly  alien  to  his  previous  thought. 
This  means  that  chronological  charts  of  St.  Paul's  advance 
in  Christian  knowledge,  which  have  pleased  no  one  but 
their  authors,  may  be  laid  aside.  It  is  a  better  plan  to 
attempt  a  comprehensive  view  of  his  thought  in  its  plastic 
and  vivid  unity.  Enough  if  we  mark  here  and  there  a 
difference  of  accent  in  earlier  and  later  formulations. 

Literature — Schmidt,  Die  imulinimhe  Chrislologie,  1870  ;  Somerville, 
St.  Paul's  Conception  of  Christ,  1897  ;  Mort'att,  Paul  and  Paulinism,  1910  ; 
Olschewski,  Die  Wurzdn  der  2}ciulini.'-:chen  Christologie,  1909 ;  Goguel, 
L'apCtre  Paul  et  Jtsus  Christ,  1904  ;  Weiiiel,  Paulus  der  Mcnsch  und  scin 
Werk,  1904  (Eng.  tr.  1906) ;  Wrcde,  Paulus^,  1907  (Eng.  tr.  1907) ;  Kaftan, 
Jesus  und  Paulus,  1906  ;  Feine,  Jesus  Christus  und  Paulus,  1902  ;  Bruckner, 
Die  Enstehung  der  pauliiiiychen  Christologie,  1903 ;  Kolbing,  Die  geistigc 
Wirkung  der  Person  Jesu  auf  Paulus,  1906. 

*  von  Dobschiitz,  Kommenlar  (1910),  in  loc 


50  THE    PERSON    OF    JESUS    CHRIST 

Is  a  genetic  account  of  St.  Paul's  view  of  Christ 
possible  ?  Can  we  tell  what  set  his  mind  a- working  on 
the  subject,  or  what  quickening  influences  shaped  his 
beliefs  ?  Holsten,  preceded  by  Baur,  long  maintained  that 
we  must  take  the  apostle  strictly  as  a  theologian,  whose 
letters  are  brief  statements  of  dogmatic.  He  wrote  primarily 
as  a  logician,  only  in  the  second  place  as  a  missionary.  Like 
his  other  doctrines,  Christology  took  form  in  his  mind  as 
the  outcome  of  a  reasoning  process,  of  pure  logic  applied  to 
the  fate  of  Jesus.  Confronted  by  the  Messiah's  death  on  the 
cross,  an  event,  as  he  felt,  laden  with  the  Divine  redemptive 
purpose,  St.  Paul,  yielding  to  a  strictly  intellectual  com- 
pulsion, gave  up  the  theological  system  of  Judaism  and 
replaced  it  by  one  in  which  Christ  appeared  as  a  synthesis 
of  historical  tradition  and  Hellenistic  doctrines  of  a  pre- 
existent  "  Heavenly  Man."  It  is  a  theory  deeply  marked 
by  the  influence  of  Hegelian  dialectic.  On  such  terms 
St.  Paul's  gospel,  as  Kaftan  puts  it,  is  simply  the  gnosis 
of  the  Messiah's  death ;  not  the  fruit  of  a  great  religious 
experience,  but  the  cold,  rational  production  of  a  patient 
theorist. 

More  recently  the  place  of  Holsten's  purely  imman- 
ental  theory  has  been  taken  by  that  of  a  large  and  active 
school  of  writers,  united  by  keen  devotion  to  the  methods 
of  scientific  history  of  religion.  Their  interest  for  the  most 
part  has  lain  in  tracing  the  descent  of  ideas.  And  the  gist 
of  their  conclusions,  so  far  as  we  are  now  concerned  with 
them,  has  been  expressed  with  admirable  clearness  in 
Weinel's  somewhat  audacious  words:  "The  Christological 
dogma  already  existed  in  all  essential  particulars  before 
Jesus  was  born.  Jewish  Messianic  speculations  had 
already  imagined  a  picture  for  the  completion  of  which 
nothing  was  wanting  but  the  Nicene  dogma  that  the 
Father  and  the  Son  were  of  the  same  substance.  .  .  .  Even 
the  statement  that  the  world  was  created  by  the  Son  of 
God  was  as  current  an  opinion  among  the  Jews  as  every- 
thing else  that  Paul  tells  us  of  Christ's  life  from  the 
beginning  of  the  world   until  His  second  advent  in  judg- 


HOLSTEN    AND    WEINEL  51 

ment."^  The  value  of  this  may  be  gathered  from  the  single 
fact  that  in  Jewish  ]\Iessiauism  the  ideas  of  a  redeeming 
death  and  triumphant  resurrection  are  nowhere  to  be  found. 
Apart  from  this  damaging  circumstance,  however,  it  is  of 
interest  to  note  that,  according  to  Bruckner,  Wrede,  and 
other  scholars,  the  elements  even  of  the  Judaistic  "  Chris- 
tology  "  had  mostly  been  taken  over  from  Oriental  myths. 
In  various  lands  and  faiths  the  yearning  dreams  of  salvation 
had  created,  in  wavering  outline,  the  imaginative  figure  of 
a  "  Saviour " ;  and  the  different  features  of  the  sketch 
came  to  deposit  themselves,  like  crystals  in  a  supersatu- 
rated solution,  on  the  head  of  the  Messiah  hoped  for  by 
Jews.  St.  Paul,  who  fell  heir  to  this  creation  of  apocalyptic 
fancy,  merely  added  the  name  of  Jesus,  and  at  once  his 
Christology  was  complete.  Instantly  he  felt  that  Jesus 
must  have  been  and  have  done  all  things  portrayed  in  the 
Messianic  dogmatic.  The  Christ  of  the  Pauline  Epistles, 
therefore,  has  no  relation  at  all  to  the  historic  Jesus.  We 
need  scarcely  hesitate  to  regard  St.  Paul,  indeed,  as  the 
real  founder  of  our  religion. 

It  is  obviously  an  intellectualistic  theory,  as  much  so 
as  that  of  Holsten.  Waiving  the  fact,  conceded  frankly 
by  Gunkel,^  that  of  this  pre-Christian  apocalyptic  "  Christ " 
we  are  in  complete  ignorance,  the  entire  hypothesis  rests 
on  the  (a  'priori  assumption  that  there  can  have  been 
nothing  genuinely  new  and  creative  in  the  apostle's  view  of 
Christ.  His  ideas  on  the  subject  must  all  have  come  to 
him  from  outside  sources :  as  for  attributing  the  vital  core 
and  heart  of  his  Christology  to  a  vast,  revolutionising 
experience,  it  is  not  be  dreamed  of.  No  doubt  the 
Damascus  vision  counts  for  something  ;  but  what  happened 
to  him  then,  apparently,  was  not  that  he  knew  himself 
redeemed,  but  that  he  formed  a  reasoned  opinion.  He 
merely  learned  to  give  the  name  "  Jesus "  to  the  Divine 
heavenly  being  in  whom  he  believed  already.  There  is 
nothing  to  be  said  about  this  except  that  it  is  preposterous. 
If  anything  is  sure  about  St.  Paul,  it  is  that  his  theology 

'  at.  Paul,  313.  ^  Zwtn  religimisgesch.  Vcrdiindnia  d.  Nl\  94. 


52  THE    PERSON    OF    JESUS    CHRIST 

is,  as  Wernle   puts  it,  "  the   theology  of  a  converted  man." 
Every  idea  is  a  Christian  idea.      At  Damascus  there  oc- 
curred a  real  event  which  changed  his  life  from  the  centre 
to  the  circumference,  and  once  for  all  caused  him  to  forget 
the  things   that  were  behind.      It  is  vain   to  interpret  his 
Christology,  therefore,  by  the  hypothetical  contents  of  his 
mind  in  earlier  years  ;  as  vain  as  to  "  explain  "  Shakespeare's 
historical  plays  by  the  materials  he  may  have  found  in 
North's   Plutarch   or  Holinshed's  Chronicles.     To   suppose 
that  the  Pharisee  became   the   Christian  apostle  merely  in 
consequence  of    an  intellectual    readjustment,  or  that  he 
could  have  induced  the  primitive  society  to  tolerate,  let 
alone  adopt,  a  view  of  Christ  thus  generated,  appears  to 
me  a  theory  out  of  all  intelligible  relation  to  human  life. 
This  is  not  to  deny  that  certain  inherited  conceptions  may 
have  influenced   the  periphery  of  the  Pauline  doctrine,  or 
determined  the  wording  of  some  few  phrases  of  description. 
But  it  is  lost  labour  to  start  from  these  things.      St.  Paul's 
Christology  is  based  on  the  experience  of  the  glorified  Lord 
vouchsafed  to  him  in  the  hour  of  his  conversion,  illustrated 
and  confirmed  by   the    Spirit-sustained  life  of    fellowship 
with   Christ  which  was  tlien   begun.      When   he  speaks  of 
Christ,  he  is  not    combining    ideas,   but    transcribing    in- 
wardly reported  fact.     For  him  the  basis  of  true  religion 
was  not  made  by  man,  but  given  by  God  ;  and  the  knowledge 
of  Jesus  the  Christ,  through  which  he  had  peace  with  God 
and  was  become  a  new  creature,  he  owed  to  a  transforming 
spiritual  experience.^ 

The  living  and  dynamic  centre,  then,  of  the  Christology 
of  St.  Paul  is  his  experience  of  the  glorified  Lord,  by 
whom  he  had  been  "  apprehended."      In  this  respect  he  is 

1  The  drift  of  opinion  away  from  Wrede  and  Rrtickner's  view  of  St. 
Paul's  indiiference  to  the  historic  Jesns  has  been  illustrated  in  a  startling 
manner  by  the  suggestion  of  J.  Weiss,  based  on  2  Co  5^",  that  the  apostle 
came  Ih  contact  with  Jesns  at  Jerusalem  prior  to  the  crucifixion  (Paxihis 
mid  Jesus,  1909).  Much  more  attractive  is  Moffatt's  explanation  of  the 
passage,  according  to  which  "the  knowledge  of  Christ  after  the  flesh  is 
probably   the   Messianic   belief  of   Pharisaic    theology   such   as   Paul  had 


CHRISTOLOGV    DTK    TO    CONVERSION  53 

in  agreement  wiLli  the  ])iiiuitive  society.  Both  he  and 
they  looked  upward,  iu>t  backward.  The  staple  of  his 
thoiiglit  conies  not  from  inherited  ideas  as  to  the  Messiah, 
but  from  a  wonderful  inward  sense  of  possession  by  the 
sovereign  grace  of  Christ.  As  we  shall  see,  it  is  impossible 
to  fuse  too  intimately  his  doctrine  of  Christ  and  of  the 
Spirit.  Yet,  on  the  other  hand,  this  exalted  One  is 
identical  with  Jesus  who  died  for  sin.  The  apostle  cannot 
think  of  Christ  and  not  think  also  of  the  cross  He  bore ; 
"I  determined,"  he  writes  to  the  Corinthians,  "to  know 
nothing  among  you  but  Jesus  Christ,  and  Him  crucified " 
(1  Co  2^).  We  must  conclude  that  his  mind  started  from 
the  Eisen  One  who  encountered  him  in  glory  at  Damascus, 
moved  thence  to  the  cross,  which  the  Lord  had  endured, 
and  came  finally  to  rest  on  the  person  of  the  Crucified. 
His  present  experience  of  Christ  is  decisive  as  to  what 
he  must  think  of  the  death  undergone  by  the  Messiah  ; 
on  the  other  hand,  the  fact  that  such  a  reconciling  death 
was  possible  is  an  index  of  the  inherent  dignity  of  Him 
who  suffered.  The  full  truth,  accordingly,  is  not  to  be 
expressed  either  by  saying  that  St.  Paul's  view  of  Christ's 
person  is  derived  from  his  doctrine  of  atonement,  or,  con- 
versely, that  his  Christology  fixed  his  doctrine  of  the 
atonement.  In  reality,  person  and  work  define  each  other. 
The  exalted  Lord,  known  from  the  first  as  such,  would  not  be 
Lord  unless  He  had  died  "  for  our  offences "  (Eo  42^^-) ; 
on  the  other  hand,  what  Christ  inherently  is  to  God  accounts, 
in  the  apostle's  view,  for  the  supreme  religious  value  of 
His  acceptance  of  the  Cross. 

St.  Paul,  like  all  the  writers  of  the  New  Testament, 
is  convinced  that  the  exalted  Jesus  is  "  the  Christ "  or 
Messiah — "  Christ  "  for  him    still   keeps  a  flavour  of    its 

shared  in  his  pre-Christian  days"  {Paid  and  FauUnism,  18).  If  this  be 
so,  we  may  be  said  to  have  from  the  apostle's  own  lips  a  protest  in  advance 
against  the  modern  radical  derivation  of  his  Christology.  He  is  telling  us, 
as  in  Gal  1'^"''',  that  "from  the  very  outset,  a  better  knowledge  of  Clirist's 
nature  had  shone  upon  him."  The  whole  question  of  the  genesis  of  his 
Christological  ideas  is  very  aVily  discussed  by  Oischewski,  Die  Wurzeln  der 
paul.  Chrislologie,  1909,  whom  I  have  followed  in  some  points. 


54  THE   PERSON    OF   JESUS    CHRIST 

oflficial  sense — but  also  he  transcends  ah  initio  the  current 
Messianic  idea,  perceiving  the  cardinal  significance  of 
Jesus,  not  for  Jews  merely,  but  for  mankind.  He  nowhere 
employs  the  title  "Son  of  Man."  The  Kingdom  of  God 
he  virtually  merges  in  the  person  of  Christ.  The  phrase 
"Kingdom  of  God"  itself,  which  seldom  occurs,  was  so 
completely  Jewish  in  origin  and  associations  that  he 
must  have  found  it  unhelpful  in  his  missionary  work. 
At  the  same  time,  its  eschatological  reference  is  still 
retained  in  what  the  apostle  means  by  "  salvation "  and 
"eternal  life";  for  he  never  ceased  to  look  yearningly 
towards  a  consummation  in  which  death,  sin,  sickness, 
demons,  and  every  godless  principality  and  power  should  be 
overcome  and  annihilated.  Jesus  the  Christ  was  already 
clothed  with  universal  power,  and  would  ere  long  appear 
once  more  to  bring  all  things  to  completion.  Those 
who  had  accepted  Him  as  Messianic  King  would  at  His 
appearance  be  made  perfect  members  of  the  Messianic 
Kingdom,  and  thus  be,  in  the  full  sense  of  the  word, 
saved. 

In  tracing  now  his  conception  of  Christ  we  shall 
endeavour  to  follow  as  far  as  possible  the  movement  of  his 
own  mind,  beginning  with  the  thought  of  the  exalted  Lord, 
and  passing  back  thereafter  to  the  historical,  and  what 
may  be  called  the  eternal,  antecedents  of  Christ's  present 
glory. 

It  was  due  to  his  amazing  experience  of  conversion 
that  St.  Paul's  faith  came  to  be  fixed  steadily,  and  from 
the  very  outset,  on  the  risen  and  glorified  Eedeemer.  He 
habitually  conceives  of  Christ  as  clothed  in  the  Sofa  or 
Divine  radiance  in  which  he  first  beheld  Him  at  Damascus. 
That  moment  was  for  him  a  piercing  glimpse  of  a  new 
world  ;  his  sight  of  the  glory  of  God  in  the  face  of  Jesus 
Christ  he  can  compare  with  nothing  but  that  first  creative 
hour  when  God  said:  "Let  there  be  light!"  (2  Co  4^). 
Here  is  the  basis  of  his  faith.  From  day  to  day  he  is 
preoccupied  with  the  risen  Lord,  the  Son  whom  it  had 
pleased  God  to  reveal  in  him  (Gal  1^*^).     The  attitude  is 


THE    RISEN    SAVIOUR  55 

one,  of  course,  really  common  to  all  New  Testament 
writers,  but  St.  Paul's  unique  experience  lent  to  it  a 
peculiar  intensity  and  passion.  All  redeeming  influences 
are  streaming  out  from  Christ's  risen  power  to  fill  the  life 
of  the  believer.  He  is  not  to  be  separated,  whether  in 
thought  or  prayer,  from  God  Himself.  It  is  with  this 
one  purpose  that  He  has  been  exalted,  that  in  the  Spirit 
He  should  bring  home  to  men  the  universal  reconciliation 
with  God  once  for  all  accomplished  on  the  cross.  He  is 
Head  of  the  Church,  which  is  His  body  ;  yet  not  of  the 
Church  alone,  for  His  omnipotence,  like  His  knowledge  and 
His  love,  is  complete  and  all-embracing.  God  has  set 
Him  far  above  all  rule  and  authority  and  power  and 
dominion,  not  only  in  this  world,  but  also  in  that  which 
is  to  come  (Eph  1^^).  The  hour  of  doom  struck  for  the 
power  of  darkness  when  He  rose  from  the  grave.  Even 
yet  He  has  not  attained  the  full  victory,  which  will  cul- 
minate only  in  His  final  advent,  when  the  last  enemy 
shall  be  vanquished  and  God  will  fulfil  His  purpose  to 
sum  up  all  things  in  Christ,  both  things  in  heaven  and 
things  in  earth.  Nevertheless,  this  glorious,  royal  Lord 
is  not  far  away  from  His  people,  too  high  for  human 
need  or  for  that  sympathy  and  care  on  which  they  are 
dependent  while  yet  in  the  body.  On  the  contrary.  He 
is  within  and  beside  them  always,  to  guide,  comfort,  warn, 
inspire,  so  that  the  apostle  could  literally  speak  of  himself 
as  being  in  Christ,  of  his  life  us  being  his  own  no  longer, 
but  the  life  of  Christ  living  in  him  (Gal  2^*^),  and  could 
pray  for  his  converts  that  Christ  might  dwell  in  their 
hearts  by  faith.  Thus  in  Ko  8^^^-  the  strain  of  confidence 
and  praise  sweeps  up  from  point  to  point  with  gathering 
intensity ;  from  the  death  of  Christ  to  what  is  greater 
still,  His  rising  from  the  dead,  from  His  rising  to  His 
session  at  the  right  hand  of  God,  and  finally,  as  to  a 
height  at  which  imagination  fails,  to  His  work  of  inter- 
cession.  This  is  the  Christ  before  whose  face  St.  Paul 
lives  from  day  to  day,  and  to  whose  advent  he  strains 
forward  with  keen  desire. 


56  THE    PERSON    OF   JESUS    CHRIST 

No  part  of  the  apostle's  teaching  has  a  more  vital 
bearing  on  his  thought  of  the  Exalted  One  than  his  mystic 
conception  of  the  believer's  union  with  Christ.^  Eound 
this  idea  his  religious  feeling  crystallised.  The  phrase 
"in  Christ"  or  "in  the  Lord"  occurs  nearly  240  times 
in  the  Epistles  we  have  accepted  as  genuine,  and  it  is 
used  with  reference  to  every  side  of  experience.  "  I  am 
persuaded  in  Christ,"  he  writes  (Ro  14^"*);  "if  there  be 
any  consolations  in  Christ  "  (Ph  2^)  ;  "  the  dead  in  Christ  " 
(1  Th  4^^).  It  is  as  though  Christ  were  the  air  or 
element  in  which  the  Christian  moved  and  had  his  being, 
thinking  with  His  mind  and  willing  with  His  will.  The 
believer  has  absolutely  become  the  organ  or  instrument 
of  the  Lord,  and  is  drawn,  spirit,  soul,  and  body,  into  His 
dominating  and  recreating  life.  It  is  a  relation  of  spirit  to 
spirit,  yet  not  a  relation  individualistically  realised ;  for — 
and  this  point  is  particularly  accentuated  in  Ephesians — 
the  Church  is  the  body  of  Christ,  in  which  old  divisions  of 
Jew  and  Gentile  are  done  away.  This  final  turn  of  thought, 
however,  he  has  prepared  for  by  the  earlier  conception 
of  Christ  as  the  Head  of  the  body,  of  which  individual 
Christians  are  the  members ;  "  we,  who  are  many,"  he 
writes  to  the  Church  in  Eome,  "  are  one  body  in  Christ." 
(12^).  The  bond  uniting  Christ  and  Christians  is  such 
that  the  same  predications  can  be  made  of  both.  In  His 
death  we  also  die,  only  to  rise  in  His  resurrection  to 
newness  of  life.  His  power  is  made  perfect  in  our 
weakness ;  and  it  is  no  contradiction  of  this,  but  its  true 
expression,  that  the  apostle  bears  about  in  his  body  the 
dying  of  the  Lord  Jesus  (2  Co  4^°),  for  only  in  proportion 
as  the  private  forces  of  the  believer  decay  can  his  natural 
capacities  be  absorbed  and  utilised  by  the  higher  power 
of  Christ.  The  fact  that  St.  Paul  conceived  this  union 
or  communion  as  mediated  by  the  Spirit  may  possibly 
explain  how  he  feels  at  liberty  to  change  from  the  phrase 
"  in   Christ "  and  speak  of   Christ  dwelling  in  us ;  for  the 

^  It  has  been  expounded  with  a  fine  sympathy  by  J.  Weiss,  Die  Nachfolga 
Christi,  83-98. 


UNION    WITH    CHRIST  57 

interpenetration  between  the  Spirit-life  of  believers  and 
the  Spirit  of  Christ  is  perfectly  reciprocal.  Plainly  this 
faith-mysticism  lets  in  a  flood  of  light  on  the  Pauline 
Christology.  A  single  verse  like  2  Co  5^  "  If  any  man 
be  in  Christ,  he  is  a  new  creation,"  reveals  in  a  flash  the 
last  ground  of  his  religious  conviction  about  the  Lord. 
He  with  whom  men  can  be  thus  in  a  relation  of  mutual 
vital  possession  has  obviously  a  nature  which  is  more  than 
human ;  that  entrance  of  His  life  into  us,  met  and  appro- 
priated by  our  absorption  in  Him — whereby  we  are  able 
to  denude  ourselves  of  an  unrighteous  past  and  live  anew 
to  holiness — involves  on  His  side  something  of  the  uni- 
versality and  transcendence  of  God  Himself.  It  has  been 
argued  that  this  synthesis  of  personality  and  spiritual  im- 
manence in  the  Christ  of  St.  Paul  is  in  reality  unthinkable, 
inasmuch  as  the  two  sides  of  the  combined  idea  are 
irreconcilably  opposed,  and  to  take  tlie  combination  seriously 
can  only  lead  to  the  depersonalising  of  Christ  in  a  quasi- 
pantheism.  But  we  may  reasonably  urge  that  this  is  to 
beg  the  question  of  His  divinity,  in  a  negative  sense.  The 
figure  of  the  head  and  the  members  (Col  1^^)  seems 
peculiarly  fitted  to  represent  the  relation  of  Christ  to 
His  people  in  both  lights — as  characterised  equally  by 
transcendence  and  by  mystic  vital  union.^ 

There  is  nothing  more  luminous  or  creatively  original 
in  St.  Paul's  thought  than  his  living  correlation  of  Christ 
and  the  Sjiirit  as  they  are  manifested  in  experience.  It 
is  not  merely  that  the  phenomena  of  the  Spirit  are  for 
him  a  decisive  proof  of  Christ's  Messianic  position ;  still 
further,  the  presence  of  the  Spirit  as  a  fact  of  power  in 
the  believing  life  is  a  self-communication  of  the  Lord 
Jesus,  who  as  Spirit  dominates  the  new  order  of  being 
into  which  Christian  men  have  been  translated.  Spirit 
means  supernatural  power,  yet  not  for  St.  Paul  power 
revealed  most  typically  in  ecstatic  rapture,  but  the  ethical 
force  from  which  spring  such  normal  Christian  graces  as 
love,    joy,  peace,   long-suffering,  and    kindness    (Gal    5^"^), 

*  Cl'.  Olschewski,  o^;.  cit.  153-54. 


58  THE    PERSON    OF    JESUS    CHRIST 

which  he  sees  to  be  more  wonderful  by  far  than  speaking 
with  tongues.^  In  Dr.  Moffatt's  words,  "  his  first  experi- 
ence of  the  Lord  was  a  vision  of  Jesus  as  the  risen  and 
exalted  Christ.  The  reality  of  Christ's  nature  was  Spirit, 
on  his  view ;  Jesus  was  installed  or  constituted  Son  of 
God  with  full  powers  by  the  resurrection,  which  revealed 
and  realised  his  true  nature  as  life-giving  Spirit.  His  life 
in  the  flesh  had  limited  him.  It  was  a  phase  of  being 
which  could  not  do  justice  to  him.  But  when  that 
temporary  impoverishment  of  nature  was  over,  the 
heavenly  reality  shone  out  in  its  fulness.  The  Spirit 
radiated  on  men,  it  was  poured  into  their  hearts,  as  the 
Spirit  of  one  who  had  died  and  risen  for  the  sake  of  men. 
We  must  extinguish,  however,  the  misconception  that 
Paul  regarded  the  Spirit  as  acting  on  the  lines  of  a  natural 
force  in  the  evolution  of  the  religious  life.  To  him  it 
meant  the  gracious  power  of  God  which  evoked  faith 
in  Jesus  as  the  crucified  and  risen  Christ,  and  then 
mediated  to  the  receptive,  obedient  life  all  that  the  Lord 
was  and  did  for  his  own  people."  ^  Life  "  in  the  Spirit," 
his  characteristic  term  for  personal  religion,  can  have  its 
source  only  in  the  exalted  or  spiritual  Christ,  so  that, 
when  he  describes  men  as  being  "  in  Christ "  or  "  in  the 
Spirit,"  he  is  thinking  not  of  two  rival  or  parallel  realities, 
but  of  one  revolutionary  experience  seen  from  two  points  of 
view ;  for  life  flows  to  men  from  Christ  and  the  Spirit  in- 
differently. The  ground  of  this  epoch-making  combination 
is  clearly  to  be  sought  in  his  conversion.  He  had  met  the 
Exalted  One  face  to  face;  and  that  spiritual  event,  in 
which  the  Spirit  was  energising,  had  had  the  Lord  Jesus 
for  concrete  and  substantial  content.  This  once  for  all 
fixed  his  conception  of  the  Spirit,  lending  it  precision  of 
outline,  and  protecting  it  against  the  wandering  and 
unethical  fancies  of  paganism.  The  Spirit  of  God,  long 
promised  for  the  latter  days,  was  now  known  to  be  the 

^  His  perception  of  this  difference  of  value  marks  a  forward  step  in  the 
history  of  religion. 

2  Paul  and  Paulinism,  37-38. 


CHRIST    AND    THE   SPIRIT  59 

very  Spirit  of  Jesus.  It  is  a  salient  example  of  how  God 
reveals  new  truth  through  the  medium  of  life.  Not  only 
so ;  but  we  are  thus  once  for  all  secured  against  the 
temptation  to  explain  the  Pauline  Christology  either  as 
the  product  of  mere  theological  retlectiou  or  as  a  mosaic 
of  fragments  borrowed  from  the  traditions  of  Jewish 
apocalyptic.  In  point  of  fact,  it  is  the  offspring  of 
creative  religious  intuition,  working  upon  the  felt 
realities  of  experience.  "  Tliis  inner  fusion  with  the 
conception  of  the  Spirit,"  as  Olschewski  puts  it,  "  con- 
stitutes the  specific  and  distinctive  essence  of  Paul's 
Christology,  and  just  on  this  account  we  must  hold 
that  its  roots  lie  in  the  fundamental  experience  of 
Damascus."  ^ 

At  the  same  time,  the  relation  of  Christ  and  the 
Spirit  is  not  that  of  identity,  but  of  vital  unity.  The 
opposite  view  has  been  taken  strongly.  "  He  could  not 
distinguish  the  Son  from  the  Holy  Ghost,"  Weinel  says ;  ^ 
a  statement  the  force  of  which  is  naturally  lessened  by 
its  retractation  on  the  next  page.  The  wording  of  2  Co  3^'^ 
may  seem  to  decide  the  question ;  "  the  Lord,"  the  apostle 
avers  plainly,  "  is  the  Spirit."  Yet  the  following  clause 
faintly  reaffirms  the  distinction  in  the  words,  "  "Where  the 
Spirit  of  the  Lord  is,  there  is  liberty."  No  one  can  imagine 
that  "  Christ  "  and  "  the  Spirit  of  Christ  "  mean  the  same 
thing  precisely.  Not  to  speak  of  the  fact  that  St.  Paul 
does  not  regard  Jesus  as  the  incarnate  Spirit  of  God,  but 
affiliates  his  ideas  on  this  subject  to  other  lines  of  ancient 
thought,  various  minor  data  are  significant.  The  person 
who  died  upon  the  cross,  and  rose  again,  and  will  come 
at  last  to  judgment,  is  nowhere  named  "  Spirit."  Christ, 
moreover,  gives  the  Spirit  in  its  fulness.  And  in  the 
triple  blessing  of  2  Co  IS^'*,  the  Spirit  is  co-ordinated 
with  Christ  and  God  as  a  separately  discernible  element 
in  the  one  redeeming  agency.  It  is  important  to  recollect 
that  the  theological  ideas  of  Christianity  came  first,  and 

»  Op.  cit.  161. 

'  St.  Paul,  326  ;  cf.  Schmiedel,  Hand-Kommentar,  ii.  192. 


60  THE    PERSON    OF    JESUS    CHRIST 

that  only  afterwards  were  they  fitted  with  more  or  less 
exact  verbal  distinctions,  so  that  usage  might  for  a  con- 
siderable time  show  a  certain  fluidity  or  free  play  of 
expression.  By  the  form  of  identification  St.  Paul  indicates 
just  the  familiar  experiential  fact  that  Christ,  by  whom 
God  saves  men,  and  the  Holy  Spirit,  in  whom  He  conveys 
to  them  Divine  life,  are  so  indissociably  one  in  significance 
and  operation  and  media  that  from  the  point  of  view  of 
practical  faith  they  are  seen  as  true  equivalents  of  each 
other.  Yet  within  the  unity  there  is  distinction.  As  it 
has  been  put,  "  Christ  in  you,  or  the  Spirit  of  Clirist  in 
you ;  these  are  not  different  realities ;  but  the  one  is  the 
method  of  the  other."  ^ 

We  have  already  encountered  the  principle  that  on 
St.  Paul's  view  the  Lordship  of  Christ  first  came  to  full 
reality  at  His  exaltation  to  the  right  hand  of  God.  There 
is  a  sense  in  which  His  glory  is  superior  even  to  His 
pre-existent  life.  He  is  now  possessed  of  the  Name  above 
every  name.  It  is  represented  as  somehow  a  reward  of 
His  voluntary  sacrifice  :  "  He  humbled  Himself  .  .  .  where- 
fore God  also  highly  exalted  Him  "  (Ph  2^).  The  classic 
passage  for  this  side  of  the  Pauline  teaching  is  Eo  1*, 
which  declares  that  He  was  constituted  or  declared  Son 
of  God  with  power,  in  virtue  of  the  Spirit  of  holiness,  by 
rising  from  the  dead.  The  Divine  energy  which  effected 
the  resurrection  set  Christ  free  from  the  confining  limits 
of  life  in  the  flesh,  and  gave  untrammelled  and  complete 
expression  to  His  proper  Sonship.  With  this  we  may 
compare  Eo  14^,  a  verse  which  points  to  the  authority 
of  Christ  as  now  covering  all  men,  in  this  life  and  the 
next.  Similarly,  it  is  always  the  risen  Lord  who  bestows 
the  Spirit.  In  these  statements  it  appears  to  be  implied, 
first,  that  Christ  has  ascended  to  be  Lord  of  all  things, 
taking  this  place  subsequently  to  and  as  a  result  of  the 
resurrection  ;  and  in  the  second  place,  that  originally  His 
personal  nature  was  such  as  to  qualify  Him  for  this 
transcendent    place.      Presently  He  will   come    to    judge 

^  Moberly,  Atonement  and  Personality,  194. 


THE    LAST    ADAM  61 

the  world  in  Ood's  name.  But  in  strictness  no  sliarp  line 
of  distiuciiou  is  drawn  between  God  and  Christ  as  regards 
this  judicial  actor  function.  The  two  names  occur  jointly, 
or  as  alternatives.^  God,  or  Christ,  or  God  through  Christ, 
will  judge  men  and  work  the  last  great  change  on  believers. 
But  we  must  not  play  off  the  future  against  the  present, 
as  if  even  for  St.  Paul  the  believer  "  never  is,  but  always 
to  be,  blest."  He  shares  to  the  full  the  ardent  primitive 
hope  of  Jesus'  return,  as  inaugurating  the  final  consumma- 
tion ;  none  the  less  on  his  view  salvation  is  already  real 
through  the  present  activity  of  the  Lord  who  became 
incarnate,  died,  and  rose  again.  The  crucifixion  had  been 
the  ruin  of  the  hostile  cosmic  powers  ;  having  disarmed  and 
exposed  them,  Christ  triumphed  over  them  in  the  cross 
(Col  2^^).  The  Kingdom  of  God,  which  is  righteousness, 
and  peace,  and  joy  in  the  Holy  Spirit  (Eo  14^''),  is  actual 
even  now.  Christ  died  once,  but  the  redemptorial  virtue  of 
His  death  is  in  Him  for  ever. 

The  relation  of  the  exalted  Christ  to  men  as  Life- 
giver  leads  the  apostle,  in  one  place,  to  designate  Him  by 
the  title  of  "the  last  Adam"  (1  Co  15^^).  Adam  was 
head,  representative,  and  type  of  the  race  derived  from 
him ;  through  transgression  this  race  became  carnal  and 
subject  to  death :  so  in  like  manner,  Christ  as  risen  is  Head 
of  a  new  redeemed  race  made  one  with  God  by  His  death 
and  raised  above  the  power  of  the  flesh  by  contact  with 
the  Spirit.  Adam  was  earthly,  Jesus  heavenly ;  Adam  a 
transgressor,  Jesus  obedient ;  Adam  only  a  living  soul, 
Jesus  a  quickening  spirit,  "  a  Being  al)ove  nature,  who  had 
life  and  was  capable  of  giving  it."'^  The  new  spiritual 
principle  that  came  with  Him  is  made  incorporate  with 
all  who  trust  Him,  thus  vivifying  their  whole  being  in  its 
relation  to  God,  self,  and  all  things  else.  The  Spirit  of 
holiness  being  the  inmost  reality  of  Christ,  He  becomes 
the  organic  head  of  a  new  spiritual  creation  ;  and  as  grace 
and  life  are  more  potent  than  sin  and  death.  His  reign 

^  Cf.  Sanday  and  Headlam,  Romans,  389. 
2  Fairbairn,  Christ  in  Modem  Theology,  311. 


62  THE    PERSON    OF   JESUS    CHRIST 

will  far  exceed  in  scope  and  triumph  the  doom  entailed 
by  ancient  transgression.^ 

So  deeply  absorbed  is  St.  Paul  in  the  risen  Lord  that  it 
has  not  infrequently  been  held  that  he  was  indifferent  to 
the  historic  Jesus,  his  gospel  only  beginning  when  Jesus' 
career  on  earth  had  ended.  This,  however,  is  gravely 
misleading.  To  his  mind  the  distinction  of  earth  and 
heaven,  so  wide  for  modern  thought,  was  relatively  small. 
While  he  had  no  personal  knowledge  of  Jesus  like  that 
enjoyed  by  the  Twelve,  it  may  be  taken  as  an  assured  fact 
that  he  was  acquainted  with  the  evangelical  tradition,  and 
indeed  knew  about  Jesus  what  the  ordinary  Christian  knew. 
In  Arabia,  after  his  conversion,  he  need  not  have  lived 
wholly  apart  from  Christians.  Besides,  he  had  spent  a 
fortnight  with  St.  Peter  in  Jerusalem,  and  it  will  be 
admitted  that  much  may  be  told  in  a  fortnight  if  Jesus 
is  the  subject-matter,  and  the  learner  an  apostle.  There 
is  nothing  inconsistent  with  this  in  the  striking  language 
of  Gal  1^^:  "The  gospel  preached  by  me  is  not  according 
to  man ;  for  neither  did  I  receive  it  from  man,  nor  was  I 
taught  it,  except  by  revelation  from  Jesus  Christ " ;  which 
is  but  a  forcible  declaration  that  the  Messiahship  of  Jesus 
was  once  for  all  disclosed  to  him  by  no  human  intermediary, 
but  by  a  vision  of  the  Lord  Himself.  Jiilicher,  with  a 
pleasing  vigour,  has  observed  that  "  an  apostle  of  Jesus 
Christ  who  had  no  desire  to  know  about  the  Messiah's 
earthly  life,  and  for  dogmatic  reasons  passed  by  with  scorn, 
as  mere  carnal  weakness,  everything  revealed  by  God's 
Son  in  the  form  of  a  servant,  is  not  the  Paul  of  history, 
but  a  monstrosity  of  modern  logic."  ^  As  Drescher  shows, 
it  is  possible  to  draw  a  fairly  complete  sketch  of  Jesus, 
and  especially  of  His  character  and  disposition,  from  the 

^  From  all  this  we  may  gather  what  St.  Paul  would  have  said  regard- 
ing the  modern  attempt  to  put  him  alongside  of  Jesus  as  part  founder  of 
Christianity.  "Paul  is  not  the  second  after  Jesus,"  Deissmann  remarks 
finely,  "but  the  first  in  Christ." 

*  Jesv^  uiid  Paulus,  55. 


ST,    PAUL'S    KNOWLEDGE    OF   JESUS  63 

Pauline  materials.^  At  the  same  time,  the  interest  which 
guides  his  pen  is  not  purely  or  even  mainly  historical. 
There  is  no  reference  to  Jesus'  miracles,  His  faith,  His 
prayerfulness,  His  habits  as  a  man  amongst  men.  Certain 
words  of  Jesus  are  cited  as  authoritative,  chiefly  on  minor 
points.  His  birth.  His  sinlessness,  His  institution  of  the 
Supper,  His  death  on  the  cross  and  rising  on  the  third 
day — these  things  are  reported  wath  a  few  lesser  details. 
The  reason  for  this  comparative  reticence  must  lie  in  the 
apostle's  mind  being  engrossed  chiefly  with  the  great 
decisive  fact  of  redemption  as  an  experience.  But  it  is 
clear  that  unless  certain  facts  concerning  Jesus  were 
known  to  him,  through  historical  tradition,  the  confession 
"  Jesus  is  Lord "  would  have  meant  nothing.  Hence  it 
is  an  axiom  for  St.  Paul  that  Jesus  lived  and  was  true 
man.  He  was  made  of  a  woman,  born  of  the  seed  of 
David  according  to  the  flesh.  He  is  the  last  Adam, 
founding  a  new  humanity.  There  might  appear  to  be  a 
docetic  undertone  in  the  statement  (Ro  8^)  that  God 
sent  His  Son  "  in  the  likeness  of  sinful  flesh " ;  but  the 
meaning  is  simply  that  while  Christ's  flesh  is  as  real  as 
ours,  and  as  human,  it  was  not  like  ours  sinful.  The 
flesh  of  man,  with  this  one  exception,  was  the  pattern  of 
His  flesh,  but  in  Him  alone  it  may  be  seen  in  a  perfected 
relation  to  the  Spirit.  But  Jesus'  sinlessness — St.  Paul 
knew  of  it,  as  of  His  unique  self-consciousness,  from  the 
impression  made  on  the  disciples  and  conveyed  by  them 
to  the  new  convert — was  not  the  mere  absence  of  moral 
fault.  The  fulfilment  of  the  law  is  love,  and  the  figure 
of  the  Nazarene  who  bore  the  cross  for  sinners  must  have 
shone  upon  him  with  the  radiance  of  ineffable  and  self- 
abnegating  grace.  A  complete  moral  identity  links  the 
present  Lordship  to  the  past  humiliation. 

Yet  the  life  lived  by  Jesus  on  earth,  as  St.  Paul  dis- 
cerned, was   a   form    of    being  wholly  inadequate  to  His 

*  Das  Lehen  Jesu  bei  Paulus.  For  some  admirable  pages  on  the 
harmony  of  detail  in  St.  Paul's  picture  of  Jesus  and  that  of  the  primitive 
society,  cf.  Peine,  Thcologie  d.  NT,  200  ff. 


64  THE    PERSON    OF    JESUS    CHRIST 

true  nature.  It  confined  Hira  within  limits ;  it  prevented 
the  full  manifestation  of  all  that  which  He  really  was. 
For  His  origin  lay  in  a  higher  world,  that  of  eternal  being, 
from  which  by  a  voluntary  act  He  came  amongst  men, 
taking  the  form  of  a  servant.  To  the  original  disciples 
the  astounding  paradox  had  been,  that  the  Jesus  whose 
companions  they  had  been,  and  who  had  died  in  shame, 
was  now  raised  to  the  right  hand  of  God ;  to  St.  Paul 
the  paradox  was  rather  that  the  Exalted  One,  proved  by 
resurrection  to  be  the  Son  of  God  and  of  heavenly  nature, 
should  have  taken  flesh  and  died  at  Calvary.  They  saw 
the  resurrection  against  the  lowly  ministry  with  its  still 
more  lowly  end ;  he  viewed  the  earthly  life  in  bold  relief 
against  the  glory  of  ascension  and  pre-existence.  The 
mere  fact  that  Christ  should  have  accepted  human  life,  to 
surrender  it  in  death  for  our  sake,  thrills  him  with  a 
wondering  gratitude. 

The  unique  personal  constitution  of  Jesus,  during  His 
earthly  lifetime,  consisted  of  a  body  of  flesh  and  blood, 
and,  in  addition,  of  that  which  the  apostle  denominates 
"  Spirit."  The  two  elements  are  mentioned  side  by  side 
in  Eo  1^-  * ;  on  which  Dr.  Denney  has  observed  that 
"  the  expression  Kara  irvevixa  a^iwavvr}^  characterises 
Christ  ethically,  as  Kara  adpKa  does  physically.  Not 
that  it  makes  the  sonship  in  question  '  ethical '  as  opposed 
to  '  metaphysical ' :  no  such  distinctions  were  in  the 
apostle's  thought.  But  the  sonship,  which  was  declared 
by  the  resurrection,  answered  to  the  spirit  of  holiness 
which  was  the  inmost  and  deepest  reality  in  the  Person 
and  life  of  Jesus."  ^  It  was  a  "  Spirit "  which  sealed  Him 
with  a  specific  character ;  not  merely  energising  as  Divine 
power  in  His  life,  but  supplying  the  efficient  ground  of 
His  victory  over  death.  To  it  St.  Paul's  mind  recurred, 
most  probably,  when  his  mind  dwelt  on  the  theme  of 
Christ's  pre-historic  life ;  "  Spirit "  was  the  element  or 
medium,  so  to  speak,  of  that  life,  in  virtue  of  which  there 
was  continuity  between  the  different  phases  of  His  career. 
1  EGT.  ii.  in  loc. 


THE   SON    AS    ETERNAL  65 

In  eternity,  on  earth,  and  now  in  tlie  present  and  unending 
glory,  His  unity  with  God  was  a  unity  in  or  through  "  Spirit." 

In  the  first  paragraph  of  Eonians,  as  in  the  great 
verses  we  have  just  examined,  Jesus  Christ  is  designated 
the  "  Son  of  God,"  a  title  never  used  by  St.  Paul  save 
with  a  certain  grave  solemnity.^  It  is  no  longer  a 
Messianic  name  of  honour  merely ;  it  has  been  assigned 
the  loftier  function  of  expressing  the  original  and  inherent 
unity  of  life  by  which  Christ  is  conjoined  with  God.  Accord- 
ing to  the  usage  of  the  Old  Testament,  he  was  specifically 
God's  Son  on  whom  God's  love  was  set,  but  in  St.  Paul 
this  is  a  mode  of  thought  transcended,  even  if  not  cancelled. 
If  we  take  verses  like  Eo  8^^ :  "  He  that  spared  not  His 
own  Son,"  or  Col  1^^:  "the  Son  of  His  love,"  we  can 
only  agree  with  Weiss  that  "  it  would  be  a  mistake  to 
interpret  these  passages  as  though  '  sonship '  were  merely 
another  way  of  expressing  love ;  because  God  so  loved 
this  being,  therefore  he  was  the  Son  of  God.  The  reverse 
is  true :  Because  he  is  the  Son,  therefore  God  loves  him."  ^ 
Son  of  God  by  eternal  nature — it  is  in  this  character  that 
He  comes  into  the  world.  Already  in  that  unbeginning 
life  He  had  been  the  image  of  the  invisible  God  (Col  1^^). 
"We  are  not  entitled  to  make  the  apostle  responsible  for 
an  explicit  doctrine  of  "  eternal  generation  "  ;  but  unques- 
tionably he  does  mean  that  the  relation  of  Christ  to  God 
is  increate  and  essential.  It  has  been  inferred  from 
Pio  1*,  where  the  Sonship  of  Christ  is  put  in  connection 
with  His  rising  from  the  dead,  that  the  Pauline  Christ  is 
Son  only  after  the  resurrection.  But  the  words  really 
mean  that  only  then  was  His  Sonship  fully  and  actually 
manifested ;  He  is  hioivn  as  Son  from  that  point  onwards, 
but  by  inference  the  mind  passes  beyond  and  behind  that 
fact  to  the  Sonship  which  is  superior  to  time. 

^  "With  scarcely  an  exception  it  is  only  used  in  such  portions  of  the 
letters  as  are  marked  by  an  especial  elevation  of  style  "  (Weinel,  St.  Paul, 
324).     Examples  are  Ro  8^^  1  Co  l^,  Gal  2=". 

^  J.  Weiss,  Christ :  the  Btginnings  of  Dogma,  66. 

5 


66  THE   PERSON    OF   JESUS    CHRIST 

It  is  observable  that  St.  Paul  touches  on  our  Lord's 
pre-existence,  always  or  nearly  always,  in  a  quite  incidental 
manner.  This  does  not  prove  that  the  idea  was  no  part 
of  his  "  gospel " — a  point  on  which  so  far  we  have  no 
evidence — but  it  proves,  at  all  events,  that  pre-existence 
was  an  idea  so  familiar  to  Christians  as  to  require  no 
explanation  or  apology.  Nowhere  is  his  tone  that  of  the 
sponsor  for  a  doctrinal  novelty. 

As  to  particular  texts,  undue  weight  must  not  be 
placed  on  Gal  4*,  "  God  sent  forth  His  Son,"  although  the 
phrase  is  significant  enough  (cf.  Ro  8^).  Somewhat  more 
explicit  is  1  Co  10^  where  it  is  asserted  that  the  Eock 
which  followed  the  Israelites  in  the  desert,  and  of  which 
they  drank,  was  Christ ;  He  is  conceived,  that  is,  as  having 
played  a  real  part  in  Old  Testament  history.  And  there 
is  general  agreement  that  2  Co  8^  bears  not  upon  the 
"  poverty  "  of  Jesus'  lifetime  on  earth,  but  on  His  sacrifice 
in  being  born  ;  for  the  "  poverty  "  and  "  riches  "  in  question 
must  obviously  be  correlative,  and  since  He  neither  was 
Himself  rich  in  the  literal  sense,  nor  made  others  so,  it  is 
impossible  to  take  literally  the  poverty  here  ascribed  to 
Him.  The  verse  is  one  which  in  import  transcends  the 
phenomena  of  time  and  space,  announcing  not  merely  that 
Christ's  earthly  life  was  inferior  in  glory  to  His  prior 
condition,  but — a  yet  more  sublime  thought — that  He 
entered  upon  the  lower  state  by  His  own  volition. 
Finally  there  is  Ph  2^"^,  a  passage  "marked  by  epic 
fulness  and  dignity,"  the  amplest  and  most  deliberate  of 
all  St.  Paul's  declarations  on  the  theme.  Lightfoot  has 
thus  paraphrased  vv.^  and  ^ :  "  Though  existing  before 
the  worlds  in  the  Eternal  Godhead,  yet  He  did  not  cling 
with  avidity  to  the  prerogatives  of  His  Divine  majesty, 
did  not  ambitiously  display  His  equality  with  God ;  but 
divested  Himself  of  the  glories  of  heaven,  and  took  upon 
Him  the  nature  of  a  servant,  assuming  the  likeness  of 
men."  ^  Christ,  that  is,  came  into  our  world  from  a 
previous    state  of    Divine    existence ;    in    that   estate   He 

^  Philippians,  110. 


THE    CONCEPTION   OF    PRE-EXISTENCE  67 

possessed  self-conscious  independent  life,  with  a  will  that 
ruled  itself ;  a  will  that  might  liave  been  exerted  in  other 
modes,  but  actually  was  exerted  in  this  mode  of  self- 
abnegation.  It  is  asserted — and  on  the  assertion  hinges 
the  thrilling  moral  appeal  of  the  passage —  that  before 
He  came  as  man  Christ's  life  was  Divine  in  quality ; 
not  merely  like  God,  but  participant  in  His  essential  attri- 
butes (ijLop(f»)).  The  crucial  fact  is  that  the  apostle,  even 
though  refraining  from  speculation  as  to  the  relationship 
to  God  of  the  Eternal  Son,  does  not  scruple  to  describe 
Him  as  subsisting  in,  and  then  giving  up,  "  a  being  so  in 
the  form  of  God  that  to  be  equal  with  Him  is  a  thing  of 
nature."  He  took  a  life  of  manhood  through  the  abdication 
of  infinite  glory.  And  the  motif  of  the  passage — meta- 
physical only  so  far  as  it  is  ethical — lies  in  the  subduing 
thought  that  when  it  was  open  to  Christ  so  to  employ 
the  powers  of  His  inherently  Divine  dignity  as  to  insist  on 
being  worshipped  as  God,  He  chose  to  reach  this  supreme 
position,  of  Lordship  acknowledged  universally,  by  the 
path  of  lowliness,  obedience,  and  death.  Thus  His  descent 
reveals  the  vastness  of  His  love,  and  justifies  His  later 
exaltation. 

This  exaltation  is  undoubtedly  conceived  as  in  a  real 
sense  the  reward  of  the  great  sacrifice  that  went  before ; 
on  the  other  hand,  to  talk  of  "  deification "  is  out  of 
all  keeping  with  the  apostle's  mind.  To  a  Jew  the  notion 
that  a  man  might  become  God  would  have  been  fiat 
blasphemy.  Ascension  only  served  to  bring  out  in  full 
actuality  what  was  originally  implicit ;  it  but  unfolded  the 
essential  glory  and  dignity  of  Christ's  person.  Pre- 
existence  and  Lordship,  therefore,  are  in  strictness  relative 
to  each  other.^ 

It  is  of  course  possible  to  discount  the  impression 
made  by  such  declarations.  The  first  believers,  it  may  be 
said,  vied  with  one  another  in   finding  or  inventing  names 

^  Cf.  H.  A.  A.  Kennedy,  EGT.  iii.  in  loc.  Too  much  importance  should 
not  be  ascribed  to  Deissmann's  interesting  suggestions  as  to  tlie  influence  on 
St.  Paul  of  language  associated  with  the  worship  of  the  Emperor. 


68  THE   PERSON    OF   JESUS    CHRIST 

by  which  to  enhance  Jesus'  glory.  But  whether  they  spoke 
of  His  birth  of  a  virgin  or  His  eternal  Souship,  it  was  only 
a  hyperbolical  attempt  to  utter  His  spiritual  greatness. 
The  idea  of  His  pre-existence,  Jlllicher  has  surmised, 
may  have  been  helped  into  currency  by  the  widespread 
contemporary  belief  in  the  transmigration  of  souls.  "  If 
I  have  been  man  already,  innumerable  times,  why  should 
Jesus  not  have  lived  in  heaven  for  centuries  as  the  Son 
of  God  ?  "  ^  In  other  quarters  it  has  been  maintained  that 
for  St.  Paul's  mind,  as  for  the  mind  of  his  fellow-Christians, 
the  thought  of  Christ's  pre-existence  was  no  more  than  a 
subordinate  and  ancillary  symbol.  It  is  obvious  that 
whatever  names  St.  Paul  might  use  would  have  had  their 
own  previous  history,  but  we  must  not  beg  the  question 
whether  he  could  or  could  not  fill  them  with  a  new 
significance.  Further,  it  is  vain  to  urge  that  the  con- 
ception of  pre-existence  is  either  peculiar  to  St.  Paul  or 
of  merely  peripheral  importance  for  his  view  of  Christ. 
It  is  present  conspicuously  in  Hebrews  and  in  the 
Johannine  writings ;  there  is  some  reason  to  believe, 
indeed,  that  it  derives  ultimately  from  Jesus.  In  the 
presence  of  these  facts,  it  is  gratuitous  to  plead  that  the 
writers  of  the  New  Testament  attached  to  it  only  minor 
religious  value,  and  would  have  waived  it  readily  to  satisfy 
an  objector. 

The  origin  of  St.  Paul's  thought  of  pre-existence  has 
been  sought  especially  in  the  alleged  Jewish-Hellenic 
idea  of  a  pre-existent  "  heavenly  Man,"  the  archetype 
and  pattern  of  created  manhood.  Following  the  Alex- 
andrian theory,  as  various  scholars  have  maintained 
since  Baur,  he  taught  that  Christ  pre-existed  in  heaven 
as  a  human  personality,  inclusive  of  a  body.  The  evidence 
for  this  startling  hypothesis  is  of  the  slenderest.  In 
Ro  5  the  parallel  between  Adam  and  Christ  is  more  an 
illustration  than  anything  else ;  it  is  St.  Paul's  way  of 
saying  that  Christianity  is  the  absolute  religion.  And 
in  1  Co  15**"*^ — the  locus  dassicus — all  likelihood  of 
*  Paulas  und  Jesus,  32. 


THE    HEAVENLY    MAN  69 

Alexandrian  influence,  except  possibly  by  way  of  implied 
polemic,  is  negatived  by  two  main  considerations :  that  the 
"  heavenly  Man  "  whom  Philo  names  "  the  First  Man  "  is 
emphatically  named  "  the  Second  Man "  by  St.  Paul,  and 
that  the  passage  is  throughout  concerned  not  in  the  least 
with  the  pre-existent  but  with  the  exalted  Christ.  It  was 
only  in  virtue  of  resurrection  that  He  became  the  arche- 
type and  head  of  a  new  race.  It  would  be  arbitrary  to 
deny  that  the  apostle's  mind  may  have  owed  something  to 
such  floating  conceptions  of  transcendence  as  the  Philonic, 
but  it  is  still  more  unfounded  to  describe  it  as  in  any  intel- 
ligible sense  the  germ  or  organic  core  of  his  Christology, 
since  in  point  of  fact  it  is  mentioned  merely  in  one  chapter  of 
one  epistle.  A  minor  but  equally  decisive  circumstance  is 
its  incompatibility,  in  its  Alexandrian  form  at  all  events, 
with  other  Pauline  statements  as  to  the  pre-existent  One. 
A  being  who  was  from  eternity  in  the  form  of  God  could 
not  also  be  said  to  have  eternally  worn  a  human  body. 
The  notion,  however,  that  St.  Paul's  view  of  Christ  started 
from  the  idea  of  the  "  heavenly  Man "  will  always  fasci- 
nate those  who  are  resolved  to  interpret  his  "gospel"  in 
exclusively  humanitarian  terms. 

The  pre-existent  Christ  is  further  conceived  as  having 
mediated  by  personal  Divine  agency  in  the  creation  of  the 
world  (1  Co  8^  Col  V^^-).  If  there  be  a  reference  to 
Gnosticism  in  the  latter  passage,  as  is  probably  the  case, 
it  is  by  way  of  recoil,  not  of  imitation.  I  quote  again 
Lightfoot's  paraphrase :  "  He  is  the  perfect  image,  the 
visible  representation  of  the  unseen  God.  He  is  the 
Firstborn,  the  absolute  Heir  of  tlie  Father,  begotten  before 
the  ages ;  the  Lord  of  the  Universe  by  virtue  of  primo- 
geniture, and  by  virtue  also  of  creative  agency.  For  in 
Him  and  through  Him  the  whole  world  was  created, 
things  in  heaven  and  things  in  earth,  things  visible  to  the 
outward  eye,  and  things  cognizable  by  the  outward  per- 
ception. His  supremacy  is  absolute  and  universal.  All 
powers  in  heaven  and  earth  are  sul>ject  to  Him.  This 
subjection   extends   even    to   the   most   exalted  and   most 


70  THE    PERSON    OF   JESUS    CHRIST 

potent  of  angelic  beings,  whether  they  be  called 
Thrones  or  Dominations  or  Princedoms  or  Powers,  or 
whatever  title  of  dignity  men  may  confer  upon 
them.  Yes,  He  is  first  and  He  is  last.  Through  Him, 
as  the  mediatorial  word,  the  universe  has  been  created ; 
and  unto  Him,  as  the  final  goal,  it  is  tending.  In  Him 
is  no  before  or  after.  He  is  pre-existent  and  self-existent 
before  all  the  worlds.  And  in  Him  as  the  binding  and 
sustaining  power,  universal  nature  coheres  and  consists."  ^ 
In  this  picture  of  Christ,  stimulated  it  may  be  in  part  by 
the  Philonic  conception  of  the  Logos,  the  apostle  moves 
onward  from  historical  to  cosmic  modes  of  interpretation. 
We  may  single  out  the  three  main  statements :  first,  Christ 
is  the  organ  of  creation,  absolute  in  function  and  eternal 
in  existence  ;  secondly,  in  Him  all  things  are  held  together, 
cohering  in  that  unity  and  solidarity  which  make  a 
cosmos ;  thirdly,  as  all  things  took  rise  in  Him,  so  they 
move  on  to  Him  as  final  goal.  The  aorist  tense  is  used 
to  affirm  that  Christ  created  all  things,  for  the  writer 
is  thinking  of  the  pre-existent  One ;  but  the  fact  that  he 
lapses  into  perfects  and  presents  is  a  suggestive  hint  that 
he  contemplates  this  pre-existence  through  the  medium, 
so  to  speak,  of  the  exalted  Life.  Or  to  put  it  otherwise, 
Christ  is  conceived  as  creator  of  the  world  qua  the  Person 
in  whom  the  universe  was  in  due  time  to  find  its  organic 
centre  in  virtue  of  His  work  of  reconciliation  ;  He  was 
the  initial  cause  of  all  things,  as  being  destined  to  be 
their  final  end.  His  function  as  Creator  is  proleptically 
conditioned  by  His  achievement  as  Saviour.  The  apostle's 
mind,  here  as  everywhere,  starts  from  the  risen  Lord,  and, 
as  Professor  Peake  observes,  "  the  work  of  the  Son  in  His 
pre-existent  state  is  referred  to,  that  the  true  position  of 
the  exalted  Christ  may  be  understood,"  ^  It  is  interesting 
to  compare  an  earlier  form  of  the  same  idea.  This  is  in 
1  Co  8^ :  "  To  us  there  is  one  God,  the  Father,  of  whom 
are  all  things,  and  we  unto  Him ;  and  one  Lord,  Jesus 
Christ,  through  whom  are  all  things,  and  we  through 
^  Colossians,  144.  ^  EGT.  iii.  in  loe. 


CHRIST    AND    CREATION  71 

Him,"  Christ  is  the  agent  in  creation,  yet  He  is  here 
designated  not  as  Son,  but  by  the  title  usually  applied  to 
the  risen  Saviour.  As  in  Colossians,  the  ideas  of  creation 
and  redemption  are  united — redemption  being  the  present 
fact  from  which  thought  begins,  and  in  the  light  of  which 
alone  creation  can  be  interpreted.  The  Son  before  all  time 
is  visible  through  Christ's  historic  work  in  grace.  On 
the  other  hand,  what  is  last  in  knowledge  may  be  first  in 
reality.  In  the  Colossian  passage,  therefore,  we  can  dis- 
cern also  this  inferential  counter-movement  of  thought ; 
redemption  is  a  fruit  of,  and  has  its  basis  in,  Christ's 
place  and  work  in  nature.  The  same  oscillation  of  mind 
between  the  poles  of  eternity  and  time  may  be  seen  in 
the  Prologue  to  the  Fourth  Gospel  and  in  the  opening 
paragraph  of  Hebrews. 

In  view  of  this  exalted  estimate  of  Christ,  it  is  at 
first  disconcerting  to  read  plain  statements  in  the  same 
author  which  affirm  His  distinct  subordination  to  God 
the  Father.  A  candid  exegesis  will  acknowledge,  I 
think,  that  now  and  then  the  matter  is  too  clear  for 
dispute :  Christ  is  given  a  place  inferior  to  God,  and  His 
work  as  Mediator  and  Eeconciler  is  eventually  traced  to 
the  Father  as  originative  cause.  As  examples  we  may 
take  "  God  sent  forth  His  Son  "  (Gal  4^),  "  He  that  spared 
not  His  own  Son"  (Eo  8^^),  "God  hath  highly  exalted 
Him  "  (Ph  29),  "  It  pleased  the  Father  that  in  Him  should 
all  fulness  dwell"  (Col  1^^);  and  it  should  be  noted  that 
these  phrases  are  selected  indifferently  from  the  earlier  and 
later  writings.  The  gift  of  Christ  to  men,  His  sacrifice  in 
death,  the  saving  content  of  His  life,  and  the  bestowal  on 
Him  of  the  glory  of  exaltation  are  in  turn  asserted  to  be 
due  to  God.  The  whole  career  of  Christ,  in  short,  with 
its  vast  issues,  is  regarded  as  having  redounded  supremely 
to  the  glory  of  God  the  Father  (Ph  2^^).  To  this  we 
scarcely  need  to  add  the  explicit  statement  of  1  Co  11^: 
"  The  head  of  the  woman  is  the  man,  and  the  head  of 
Christ  is  God,"  with  which  the  great  climax  of   3-^  may 


72  THE    PERSON    OF    JESUS    CHRIST 

be  compared:  "All  things  are  yours  .  .  .  and  ye  are 
Christ's,  and  Christ  is  God's."  Even  more  striking,  per- 
haps, is  a  third  verse  in  the  same  epistle,  where  St.  Paul 
anticipates  the  final  surrender  of  the  kingdom  by  the 
Son :  "  Then  shall  the  Son  also  Himself  be  subjected  to 
Him  that  did  subject  all  things  unto  Him,  that  God 
may  be  all  in  all"  (15^^),  As  Loofs  has  shown,  it  is  a 
verse  the  mystery  of  which  laid  a  spell  on  many  of  the 
Greek  and  Latin  Fathers.^  It  appears  to  contemplate  a 
point  of  time  when  Christ,  having  put  all  enemies  under 
His  feet,  will  abdicate  and  submit  even  Himself  to  the 
Most  High.  There  is  no  parallel  to  this  anywhere  in  the 
New  Testament.^  It  may  possibly  be  a  relic  of  Jewish 
belief  as  to  the  destiny  of  the  Messiah ;  and  at  a  later 
stage,  as  in  Col  1^^  the  apostle  seems  to  have  put  it  on 
one  side.^  But  at  all  events  it  is  proof  of  the  subordina- 
tionist  aspect  of  his  view  of  Christ. 

Whatever  inference  we  build  on  these  expressions, 
they  are  at  least  no  evidence  that  St.  Paul  was  an  early 
Arian.  To  say  that  "  Christ  is  not  God,  but  the  Son  of 
God,"  or  tliat  "  The  Son  was  called  into  life  and  endowed 
with  power  by  God  for  the  creation  and  redemption  of 
mankind,"  is  to  signalise  but  one  side  of  the  Pauline 
Christology,  and  not  the  most  remarkable.  We  are  justi- 
fied in  saying  that  his  view  was  not  simply  incoherent. 
But  it  is  certain  that  he  held  the  deity  of  Christ.  If 
he  nowhere  puts  it  with  dogmatic  precision,  at  least 
the  doxology  in  Ko  9^  is  significant ;  also  his  habitual 
use  of  "  Lord  "  as  the  proper  title  of  the  exalted  Christ, 
and  his  frequent  bracketing  of  Christ  with  God  as  the 
fount  of  all  grace  and  peace.  The  mere  fact  that  he  could 
write  Col  2^:  "In  Him  dwelleth  all  the  fulness  of  the 
Godhead  bodily,"  is  really  decisive ;  for  the  words  mean 

^  Cf.  article  "  Christologie,"  RE.  iv. 

2  Weizsiicker  long  ago  suggested  Jn  16-^ — "  in  that  day  ye  shall  ask  Me 
nothing" — but  a  precise  exegesis  scarcely  bears  him  out  (see  Jahrh.  f. 
deictsche  Thcologle,  1857,  183-84). 

*  Cf.  Titius,  Die  neutcst.  Lchrc  von  der  Selujkeif,  2  Abtheil.  35. 


THE   SUBORDINATION    OF   THE   SON  73 

that  in  Christ  there  is  to  be  found,  as  a  unity  or  in 
organic  relation,  the  entire  sum  of  qualities  and  attributes 
by  which  the  being  of  God  is  constituted.  The  subordina- 
tion of  Christ,  therefore,  was  on  his  view  compatible  with 
His  having  a  place  within  the  sphere  of  Godhead.  It 
was  a  subjection  by  which  the  unity  of  God  was  exhibited, 
not  destroyed. 

In  the  solution  of  this  antinomy,  St.  Paul  affords 
less  aid  than  we  might  expect.  In  common  with  the 
primitive  apostolic  society,  he  looks  to  Christ  equally 
with  God  for  all  things  in  the  present  or  the  future, 
representing  now  the  one,  now  the  other,  as  Judge,  Saviour, 
and  Lord  without  any  sense  of  facing  a  painful  problem, 
much  less  a  contradiction.  Questions  on  which  a  later  age 
fastened  had  not  arisen  in  his  mind.  One  simple  mode  of 
relieving  the  strain  has  indeed  been  recommended.  It  is 
to  identify  the  Pauline  dualism  in  Christology  with  the 
twofold  interpretation  of  Christ  which  has  been  felt  to 
pervade  the  Xew  Testament  as  a  whole.  The  first  or 
historical  view  moves  always  within  the  human  fact  of 
Jesus'  life  on  earth,  finding  in  His  unique  manhood  the 
perfect  vehicle  of  Divine  grace.  The  other  or  transcendent 
view  fixes  upon  the  higher  nature  manifest  in  all  Christ's 
life  and  work,  and  from  this  recurs  to  His  pre-incarnate 
life  in  God  and  as  God.  Are  not  subordinationist  phrases 
more  easily  intelligible  (it  is  said)  if  we  relate  them  simply 
to  the  former,  or  historical,  interpretation  ?  This  would 
virtually  be  the  theory  of  Calvin,  who  comments  on 
1  Co  3^^ :  Hcec  suhjectio  ad  Christi  humanitatem  refertur. 
Jesus  Christ,  as  a  historic  person,  who  was  entrusted  with 
a  vocation  in  and  for  mankind,  and  submitted  Himself  to 
God  in  the  discharge  of  it — how  else  than  in  subordina- 
tionist terms  could  St.  Paul  speak  of  His  relation  to  the 
Father  ?  I  do  not  wish  to  deny  the  force  of  this,  which 
would  indeed  be  quite  convincing  but  for  certain  state- 
ments that  unquestionably  plant  the  subordination 
predicated  of  Christ  within  the  eternal  and  transcendent 
sphere.       The    pre-incarnate    One    and    the    Eisen    Lord 


74  THE    PERSON    OF   JESUS    CHRIST 

equally  are  pictured  as  subject  to  the  rule  of  God  the 
Father  (Gal  4*,  Col  1^^).  The  Son  is  personally  one  with 
God,  yet  also  subordinate  in  the  sense  indissociably  bound 
up  with  the  very  thought  of  sonship.  And  St.  Paul,  so 
far  as  can  be  seen,  would  not  have  consented  to  reduce 
either  of  these  two  forms  of  truth  to  the  other — Christ 
and  God  are  of  one  Divine  nature,  yet  within  this  unity 
there  obtain  relations  of  higher  and  lower. 

It  will  be  seen  that  St.  Paul's  view  of  Christ  represents 
a  noteworthy  advance  on  the  primitive  apostolic  conception 
as  indicated  by  the  Petrine  speeches  in  Acts.  He  was 
the  first  to  speak  of  Christ  as  agent  in  creation,  and 
to  draw  together  closely  the  Spirit  and  Christ's  inmost 
being.  He  led  the  way  also  in  teaching  a  mysticism 
which  has  its  pivot  or  point  of  departure  in  the  Christian's 
union  with  Christ.  In  this  sense  his  Christology  is  in- 
dependent and  unique.  This  originality  has  been  turned 
into  a  grave  charge  against  the  credibility  of  his  conclusions 
by  those  who  argue  that  we  cannot  really  expect  a  true 
estimate  of  the  person  and  work  of  Christ  from  one  who 
had  not  been  an  immediate  disciple.  Whether  he  did  or 
did  not  spin  Christology  freely  out  of  his  own  mind,  at 
least  we  are  unable  to  control  the  statements  for  which  he 
makes  himself  responsible. 

It  is  a  striking  fact,  however,  that  his  estimate  of 
Christ  never  became,  so  far  as  we  know,  the  subject  of 
controversy  in  the  primitive  Church.^  Men  who  dissented 
violently  from  his  interpretation  of  the  Law  found  no 
difficulty  in  his  conception  of  the  Saviour.  His  was  one 
true  way,  they  felt,  of  stating  the  impression  made  on  him 
and  them  alike  by  the  crucified  and  exalted  Lord.  He 
nowhere  betrays  a  feeling  that  the  idiosyncrasies  of  his 
thought  are  leading  him  on  to  dangerous  ground  where  he 
must  move  with  a  tender  regard  for  others.  He  can 
count  on  sympathy  and  comprehension.      The  categories  he 

^  Not  that  controversy  would  discredit  his  interpretation  ;  but  in  point 
of  fact  there  was  none. 


ST.    PAUL'S    VIEW    ORTHTNAL  75 

employed  were  such  as  to  gain  the  coutidcuce  and  approval 
of  Christian  men. 

Nevertheless,  it  may  be  argued  that  the  aptness  of  the 
Pauline  Christology  to  the  first  century  is  precisely  the 
reason  why  it  is  impossible  for  us.  Owing  to  the  provi- 
dential advance  of  human  thought  we  have  irrecoverably 
lost  his  point  of  view.  The  fact  tluat  primitive  believers 
welcomed  his  estimate  of  Jesus  is,  moreover,  no  evidence 
of  its  real  truth.  Naturally  all  views  of  Christ  that 
enhanced  His  glory  or  gave  worthy  expression  to  His 
redeeming  influence  were  pleasing  to  their  minds ;  but 
they  would  certainly  have  greeted  a  different  set  of 
thought-forms  with  equal  fervour,  provided  they  rose  to 
the  same  level  of  imaginative  and  ideal  power. 

This  is  true  no  doubt  in  the  sense  that  some  im- 
portant elements  in  the  Christology  of  St.  Paul  are  even 
yet  of  partially  dubious  interpretation ;  it  is  a  vain  ques- 
tion whether  we  accept  them,  for  we  cannot  tell  what  they 
mean.  Who  will  claim  to  know  for  certain  the  whole 
import  for  the  apostle's  mind  of  such  phrases  as  "  the  form 
of  God  "  and  "  the  form  of  a  servant "  (Ph  2^«-),  as  they 
are  predicated  successively  of  the  pre-existent  and  the 
incarnate  Christ  ?  Nor  can  we  deny  that  several  pre- 
Christian  influences — Jewish  theology,  Philo,  Stoicism — 
may  have  left  their  mark  on  his  language.  Yet  it  is 
an  unseeing  criticism  which  finds  in  these  anything  more 
than  the  outward  setting  of  the  picture.^      If  the  gospel 

'  Cf.  a  valuable  page  in  Reischle,  Theologie  und  Religionsgesehichte, 
40.  Harnack's  recent  statement  is  also  worth  quoting  :  "It  is  utterly 
improbable  that  St.  Paul  arrived  at  the  central  conception  of  a  Son  of  God, 
who  died  and  rose  again,  through  the  myths  of  Western  Asia  ;  the  premises 
of  his  reasoning  and  the  historical  premises  which  lay  in  the  death  on  the 
cross  and  the  belief  in  the  resurrection  of  Jesus  must  of  themselves  have 
led  him  up  to  it.  But  it  is  quite  possible  that  the  idea  underlying  those 
myths  had  won  some  influence  over  him,  without  his  being  aware  of  it,  not 
only  upon  the  cosmological  development  of  tlie  idea,  but  also  ui>on  the 
determination  and  power  with  which  the  apostle  advanced  it "  {Fifth 
International  Congress  of  Free  Christianily,  1910,  p.  104). 

Similarly,  how  much  had  been  done  by  the  progress  of  Hellenistic  religious 
thought  to  prepare  the  term  awrrip  for  Christian  usage  we  may  learn  from  the 


76  THE    PERSON    OF   JESUS    CHRIST 

was  for  the  men  of  that  age,  it  must  be  conveyed  in 
the  vernacular  of  their  minds,  by  those  to  whom  con- 
temporary ideas  formed  a  natural  and  vital  atmosphere. 
On  the  other  hand,  it  is  in  no  way  fatal  to  the  validity 
of  an  idea — that  of  pre-existence,  for  example — that  it 
should  have  had  a  previous  history  in  Jewish  thought. 
The  revelation  of  God  in  Christ,  if  interpreted  at  all, 
must  of  course  be  interpreted  by  ideas  already  present  in 
the  world ;  ideas,  we  may  believe,  not  altogether  un- 
moulded  by  a  higher  wisdom  for  the  service  they  were 
to  render.  If  in  addition  we  contemplate  the  Pauline 
Christology  as  a  whole,  we  perceive  that  in  every  age  it 
has  gained  the  free  recognition  and  assent  of  the  Christian 
mind.  The  thought,  for  example,  that  Christ  by  essential 
nature  is  such  that  He  gathers  men  into  union  with 
Himself,  opening  the  gates  of  His  spiritual  being  to  receive 
us  as  only  God  can ;  that  in  eternal  love  He  bowed  down 
to  earth  to  bear  man's  sin ;  that  the  destinies  of  His 
Church  and  of  the  world  are  in  His  hands  for  ever — • 
can  we  dismiss  these  things  as  the  outworn  formulas  of  a 
remote  past,  in  which  there  remains  no  substance  or  value 
any  more  ?  On  the  contrary,  they  rise  spontaneously  in 
the  intelligence  of  those  who  to-day  are  impressed  by 
Jesus  as  they  were  who  first  believed  in  Him.  But 
more,  the  Christology  of  St.  Paul  is  possessed  of  that 
sublime  and  inexhaustible  quality  which  is  native  to 
enduring  truth.  His  loftiest  descriptions  of  the  Lord 
Jesus,  far  from  having  faded  into  obsolescence,  still  evoke 
our  reflection,  as  they  elude  it,  by  their  very  greatness. 

researches  of  men  like  Paul  Wendland  (cf.  liis  article  in  the  Zeitschrift  fiir 
ncutcst.  Wissenschaft,  1904,  335  ff.).  Christians,  we  can  see,  employed  that 
term  to  express  the  glorious  fact  that  in  Jesus  they  had  found  everything 
which  can  be  called  salvation — from  sin,  from  death,  from  judgment,  from 
the  tyranny  of  demons.  In  the  case  of  New  Testament  writers,  however, 
it  is  scarcely  questionable  that  the  old  form  has  been  filled  witli  a  new  spirit. 
Indeed,  it  may  be  argued  that  they  "  consciously  and  deliberately  ojiposed 
the  2wr^/)  who  had  ap|ieared  to  them,  and  His  influence,  to  the  earthly 
(rwTTjpes  and  their  false  titles  of  honour."  This  certainly  holds  true  of  the 
Apocalypse  (see  Moffatt's  Commentary  in  the  Expositor's  Greek  Testament, 
V.  307-17).     Cf.  Harnack,  Redcn  iind  Avfsdtze,  i.  299  ff. 


ELEMENTS    OF    PERMANENCE  77 

Thev  are  still  beyond  us  as  of  old ;  we  can  but  throw  out 
our  minds  at  an  infinite  reality ;  and  to  the  last  the 
believing  consciousness  will  vainly  strive  to  know  the 
depth  and  height  beheld  by  the  apostle  in  Christ  Jesus  as 
he  wrote  :  "  In  Him  were  all  things  created,  in  the  heavens 
and  the  earth,  things  visible  and  things  invisible  ...  for 
in  Him  dwelleth  all  the  fulness  of  the  Godhead  bodily." 


CHAPTER   TV. 

THE  CHRISTOLOGY  OF  THE  EPISTLE  TO 
THE  HEBREWS. 

In  point  of  time,  the  Epistle  to  the  Hebrews  is  the  first 
systematic  sketch  of  Christian  theology,  A  very  complete 
picture  of  Christ  is  drawn,  line  after  line  being  added  to 
fill  out  the  majestic  introductory  representation  (1^~*). 
His  person  is  contemplated  throughout  as  the  source  or 
presupposition  of  the  work  accomplished  by  Him  as  the 
High  Priest  of  men.  Jesus,  we  read,  is  "  the  Mediator 
of  a  new  covenant"  (12-^  cf.  9^^  and  8^);  this  is  His 
essential  function  ;  and  the  pre-eminence  of  the  new 
covenant  over  the  old,  as  well  as  its  lasting  glory,  is  due 
to  the  incomparable  dignity  of  the  one  eternal  Priest. 
Christ  is  like  Aaron  in  certain  ways :  His  commission  is 
from  God,  not  self-assumed,  and  for  all  His  unique  superi- 
ority He  keeps  touch  with  the  needs  and  frailties  of  the 
people,  one  with  them  in  suffering  and  temptation.  But 
still  more  He  is  unlike  Aaron :  He  abides  a  priest  con- 
tinually (7^^)  ;  being  holy,  guileless,  undefiled,  and  separate 
from  sinners,  He  needs  not  to  offer  sacrifice  for  His  own 
sin,  as  in  the  old  order  (7^^).  Formerly  men  were  made 
priests  without  an  oath,  whereas  in  constituting  Jesus  the 
Son  a  priest  for  ever  "  the  Lord  sware,  and  will  not  repent " 

Literature  —  Riehm,  Der  Lchrhegriff  des  Hehraerhriefs'^,  1867; 
Menegoz,  La  thtologie  de  Veintre  aux  Hcbreux,  1894  ;  Davidson,  Hebrews, 
1882;  Bruce,  The  Epistle  to  the  Hebrews,  1899;  Milligan,  The  Theology  of 
the  Epistle  to  the  Hebrews,  1899  ;  Bousset,  Die  Religion  des  Judenihicms^, 
1906;  Fairbairu,  Chi'ist  in  Modern  Theology,  1893;  Drumniond,  Philo 
Judceus,  1888. 

78 


THE    HUMAN    JESUS  79 

(7^^).  With  His  life  and  death  a  new  dispensation  has 
opened : 

"  In  Him  the  shadows  of  the  Law 
Are  all  fulfilled,  and  now  withdraw." 

His  sole  earlier  type  is  Melchisedec,  that  ancient  and 
mystic  figure  in  whom  king  and  priest  are  one,  "  the 
direct  creation  of  God,  without  any  of  the  accidents  of 
time,"  independent  alike  of  descent  and  posterity.  Already 
we  can  see  that  Christology  is  the  doctrinal  centre  of  the 
Epistle. 

The  writer  makes  no  profession  of  having  been  an  eye- 
witness, yet  his  picture  of  Jesus  is  singularly  vivid  and 
arresting.  He  must,  one  feels,  have  had  access  to  good 
original  tradition.  Nowhere  in  the  New  Testament  is 
the  humanity  of  Christ  set  forth  so  movingly;  for  "not 
even  all  the  Gospels  show  us  Jesus  in  the  weakness 
of  His  flesh  side  by  side  with  the  purity  of  His  spirit, 
as  He  is  exhibited  here. "  ^  We  see  Him  proclaiming 
salvation  (2^),  agonising  in  prayer  (5'^),  embracing  the 
Cross  with  joy  and  faith  (12^),  suffering  the  last  penalty 
without  the  city  gate  (13^^).  The  name  "  Jesus  "  occurs 
by  itself  at  least  ten  times.  Sprung  from  the  tribe  of 
Judah,  He  passed  through  the  normal  development  of 
human  life,  learning  obedience,  even  though  a  Son,  by  the 
things  which  He  suffered  (5^).  Into  His  course  there 
entered  sinless  frailty  and  dread  temptation ;  no  aspect 
of  His  life  or  character  escaped  the  assault  of  evil.  And 
thereby  He  was  schooled  in  sympathy.  Yet  no  corrupt  strain 
existed  in  His  nature  to  which  temptation  could  appeal. 
His  sinlessness  is  definitely  affirmed,  more  particularly  as 
a  supreme  qualification  for  His  work  as  Saviour  and  Inter- 
cessor. A  frank  emphasis,  without  parallel  in  the  New 
Testament,  is  laid  on  His  human  virtues.  These  constitute 
the  ethical  life  of  the  Son  of  God.  There  are  allusions  to 
His  fidelity  (S^),  His  trust  in  God  (2^^),  His  piety  (S^), 
His  patience  under  reproach  (12^).  The  strong  crying 
and  tears  with  which  He  is  said  to  have  prayed  "  to  Him 
^  Bruce,  EjjisUe  to  the  Hebrews,  443. 


80  THE    PERSON    OF    JESUS    CHRIST 

that  was  able  to  save  Him  from  death  "  are  as  unlike  as 
possible  to  the  ontological  impassivity  that  has  been 
ascribed  to  the  Clirist  of  Hebrews.  When  He  is  said  to 
have  been  "  made  perfect  "  (5^),  it  is  not  meant  that  He 
overcame  fault  or  defect,  but  that  He  realised  to  the  full 
what  He  had  it  in  Him  to  be.  He  became  perfect  through 
experience,  as  the  bud  is  perfected  in  the  flower.  Potencies 
of  absolute  goodness  were  evoked  by  a  moral  discipline 
which  made  Him  the  High  Priest  of  mankind.  Such 
unity  with  the  will  of  God,  however,  finally  expressed  in 
death,  is  not  something  which  He  gradually  acquired ;  in 
principle  it  is  something  which  He  brought  with  Him 
when  He  came  (10^ '^). 

Along  with  this  realistic  portrait  of  Jesus  goes  a  Christ- 
ology  at  least  as  lofty  as  that  of  Paul.  Hebrews,  like  tlie 
rest  of  the  New  Testament,  begins  from  the  exalted  Lord ; 
"  We  have  such  a  high  priest,"  the  writer  sums  up  at  one 
point,  "  who  sat  down  on  the  right  hand  of  the  Majesty  in 
the  heavens  "  (8^).  It  is  the  distinctive  work  of  Clirist  to 
be  Priest  within  the  veil,  "  a  minister  of  the  sanctuary, 
and  of  the  true  tabernacle "  (8^).  From  the  stress  put 
upon  exaltation  we  gather  that  Messianic  ideas  still  come 
naturally  to  the  writer's  mind,  but  they  are  receding  from 
the  foreground,  and  other  than  Messianic  terms  are  about 
to  replace  them  for  purposes  of  interpretation.  Assuming, 
then,  the  present  glory  of  Jesus,  the  writer's  argument  as 
to  His  personal  dignity  is  regressive.  He  goes  back  to 
the  original  nature  which  renders  possible  the  present 
majesty.  From  the  first  Christ  was  capable  of  what  He 
now  is. 

In  the  exordium  of  the  first  chapter,  accordingly,  Christ 
is  set  forth  as  "  Son,"  a  name  which  defines  His  nature  as 
in  essential  relation  to  the  Father.  In  the  character  of 
Son,  He  is  "  the  effulgence  of  God's  glory  and  the  very 
impress  of  His  substance"  (1^).  If  "effulgence"  or 
reflected  brightness  hints  at  essential  unity  between  light 
at  the  centre  and  light  diffused,  "  impress "  or  image  or 
facsimile  points  to  a  distinctness  in  which  one  side  of  the 


CHRIST    AS    SON  81 

duality  is  a  perfect,  yet  dependent,  reproduction  of  the 
other.^  The  language  is  no  doubt  that  of  the  schools ; 
but  the  writer  is  master  of  his  terms,  not  their  slave, 
and  can  mould  them  to  the  spirit  of  his  exposition. 
"  Son "  is  itself  a  metaphor,  and  there  appears  to  be  no 
good  reason  why  an  apostolic  writer  should  not  elucidate 
its  meaning  by  other  metaphorical  expressions  current  in 
his  own  day.  The  Divine  place  of  the  Son  is  signalised  by 
the  fact  that  in  1^  He  is  said  to  uphold  all  things  by  the 
word  of  His  power,  and  in  1^  is  actually  addressed  as 
"  God."  Possibly  in  view  of  Jewish  beliefs  as  to  the 
mediation  of  angels,  the  writer  is  at  special  pains  to 
emphasise  their  inferiority  to  the  Son.  They  are  bidden 
to  adore  Him ;  no  angel  has  ever  been  named  Son,  as  He 
is,  or  placed  on  God's  right  hand.  He  is  also  above 
Moses  and  the  prophets. 

In  spite  of  this  transcendence,  Jesus  on  earth  was  made 
a  little  lower  than  the  angels  (2^).  It  was  a  temporary  but 
real  humiliation,  for  the  life  to  which  He  stooped  in  His 
redemptive  purpose  formed  but  an  imperfect  medium  of 
His  higher  being.  He  assumed  flesh,  not  only  that  He 
might  be  apprehensible,  but  in  order  to  suffer  by  tasting 
death  for  every  man ;  and  there  is  more  than  one 
pathetic  reference  to  the  ignominy  of  the  Cross.  Nowhere 
is  the  writer's  religious  feeling  more  penetrating  than 
when  he  insists  (2^*~^^)  that  at  His  coming  into  the  world 
the  Son  did  not  stop  half-way,  but  chose  a  veritable 
share  in  our  lot.  "  Since  then  the  children  are  partakers 
in  flesh  and  blood,  He  also  Himself  in  like  manner  took 
part  of  the  same  ...  for  verily  not  of  angels  doth  He 
take  hold,  but  He  taketh  hold  of  the  seed  of  Abraham." 
We  are  led  to  think  of  a  descent  on  His  part,  even  if 
nothing  is  said,  here  or  elsewhere,  regarding  the  effect  on 
His  previous  form  of  existence  produced  by  this  sublime 
act.  Thus  He  became  High  Priest  (5^),  and  His  complete 
and  perfect  priesthood  is  the  outcome  of  His  having  been 
made  like  men  in  all  things,  in  suffering,  in  self-oblation 
^  Cf.  Fairbairn,  Christ  in  Modem  Theology,  324. 
6 


82  THE   PERSON   OF   JESUS    CHRIST 

(727^ — q\[  leading  up  to  and  culminating  in  that  death  and 
victory  by  which  He  overcame  the  devil  and  accomplished 
an  eternal  salvation  (9^'^).  God  set  the  seal  upon  His  work 
by  crowning  Him  with  glory  and  honour  (2^). 

It  has  been  held  that  in   Hebrews  the  term  "  Son " 
takes  on  a  certain  speculative  colour,  and  that  the  obviously 
ethical  significance  of    the  name   as  used  by  other  New 
Testament  writers  tends  to   give    place  to  a  sense  more 
explicitly  metaphysical.     Some    justice   there  may  be   in 
this;    yet   the   distinction  of   ethical  and  metaphysical  is 
not  one   which   we  can   press,  at   least  to  the  extent  of 
construing  the    two   ideas    as    disparate   alternatives.      It 
is   begging    the   question   to   say  that   because   "  Son,"   as 
applied  to  Jesus,  denotes  primarily  a   relation   of  special 
intimacy  and  fellowship,  the   psychological  coefficients  of 
which   we   can   in   some   degree   conceive,  it   cannot  also 
mean  a  relation  which  is  essential  and  transcendent.      If, 
as  all  will  concede,  the  name  "  Father "  is  not  incapable 
of  a  sense  equally  ethical  and  metaphysical,  may  the  same 
not  be  true  of  "  Son  "  ?      There  is  a  theological  positivism 
which  would   deny  even   to  apostolic  men  an  interest  in 
Christ  such  that  it  longs  to  know  Him  in  His  own  nature. 
It  is  a  less  simple  question  whether  in  Hebrews  the 
name  "  Son "  is  given  to  the  pre-existent  One  or  exclu- 
sively to  the  historic   Jesus.      Our  decision  will  rest   on 
materials   supplied    by   the    first    chapter.      The    writer's 
mind  clearly  starts  from  the  Sonship  revealed  by  exalta- 
tion following  upon  the  career  of  earth ;  this  is  steadily 
before  his  mind  at  every  point.      But  are  there  indications 
that  he  thought  also  of  the  pre-incarnate  life  as  a  life  of 
Sonship  ?     "  The   name,"  says   Professor  A.   B.  Davidson, 
"  is  not  directly  given  to  Him  in  His  pre-existing  state, 
but  the  inference  that  it  was  applicable  is  inevitable.     It 
was   the   same    Son   in   whom  God  spake  to   us,  through 
whom  He   made    the  worlds  (1^) ;    and   there  is  no  hint 
that   the   name   Son   became   the   possession    of    a    Being 
already  existing  on   His  entering  into  the   flesh."  ^     And 
^  Hebrews,  74. 


HIS    PRE-EXISTENCE  83 

from  a  somewhat  different  point  of  view,  Professor  Bruce 
pleads  that  the  writer's  interest  in  magnifying  the  sacrifice 
of  Christ  required  the  Sonship  to  be  of  older  date  than 
the  life  on  earth.^  We  may  note  for  ourselves,  in  addition, 
that  origination  from  God  and  precise  likeness  to  God — 
both  constituents  of  Sonship — are  in  1^  plainly  said  to 
have  characterised  the  pre-historic  One.  In  favour  of 
this  view,  though  it  has  great  names  against  it,  is  the 
fact,  noted  by  Eiehm,  that  the  Subject  of  the  three  stadia 
of  action — creation  before  all  time,  atonement  on  earth, 
and  the  heavenly  ministry — is  set  forth  as  personally 
identical  throughout.  The  same  difficulty  meets  the  ex- 
positor in  what  are  virtual  parallels,  Col  1^^  and  Jn  1^^. 

However  this  may  be,  it  is  safe  to  say  that  Hebrews 
can  be  quoted  for  the  pre-existence  of  Christ,  and  that 
this  pre-existence  is  specifically  conceived  as  personal. 
As  "Weiss  puts  it,^  all  theories  to  the  effect  that  what  is 
meant  is  no  more  than  an  impersonal  principle  go  to 
wreck  on  1^~^.  Christ's  eternal  being  is  repeatedly  made 
a  foil  to  the  sorrow,  tears,  shame,  and  death  endured  by 
Him  in  the  flesh  ;  His  earthly  life  is  an  episode,  though 
not  an  episode  merely,  in  a  history  without  beginning  and 
without  end.  It  was  the  reproach  of  Christ  which  Moses 
bore ;  it  was  by  Christ  Himself,  as  Lord,  that  of  old  the 
foundations  of  the  world  were  laid.  Very  few  words  in  all 
are  spent  on  His  pre-temporal  life,  yet  it  fills  a  larger  place 
than  in  any  other  New  Testament  Epistle.  But  the  writer 
has  no  speculative  key  to  incarnation  as  an  experience.  He 
says  not  one  word  as  to  the  method  of  it.  and  although 
he  points  out  how  the  Son  came  into  our  very  midst  by 
taking  flesh  and  blood,  there  is  no  passage  to  be  compared 
with  Ph  2^-i\  What  is  underlined  is  the  fact  that  He 
came  into  humanity,  not  out  of  it ;  His  coming  was  a 
supernatural  event.  At  the  same  time,  docetism  is  ex- 
cluded firmly.  Christ's  very  purpose  in  taking  flesh  was 
that  He  might  suffer.  Not  only  so,  but  His  experience 
has  contributed  to  His   present   character.     As  the  fruit 

*  Op.  cit.  441.  *  iVew  Testament  Theology,  ii.  189,  note. 


84  THE    PERSON    OF   JESUS    CHRIST 

of  His  passion  He  is  now  a  merciful  and  faithful  High 
Priest  in  whom  the  frail  and  sinful  are  sure  of  sympathy 
purchased  at  a  great  price.  Just  because  the  once  suffer- 
ing Jesus  is  also  the  Exalted  Head  of  the  Christian  society, 
the  idea  of  imitation  is  raised  to  the  supreme  level  of 
religious  faith.  He  is  the  Forerunner  who  has  passed 
through  the  heavens  as  our  Priest ;  He  is  the  beginner 
and  finisher  of  faith,  whose  course  of  brave  endurance  we 
must  consider,  when  tempted  to  faint  or  grow  weary.  He 
can  help  us  in  our  suffering,  inasmuch  as  He  has  Himself 
been  a  sufferer,  but  now  lives  in  glory  and  universal  power. 

The  writer's  exposition  of  Christ's  redemptive  work  is 
in  keeping  with  the  centrality  of  his  thought  of  Sonship.  It 
is  as  Son  that  Christ  discharges  priestly  functions,  sacri- 
ficing Himself  in  death,  and,  after  death  and  resurrection, 
entering  through  His  own  blood  as  priest  within  the  veil. 
In  the  character  of  Son,  also.  He  offered  Himself  to  God 
"  through  eternal  Spirit  "  (9^*,  cf.  7^*^).  This  striking  phrase 
almost  amounts  to  a  definition  of  His  nature ;  it  denotes 
that  the  Spirit  which  dwelt  in  Him  and  made  Him  what 
He  was,  proved  to  be  inextinguishable  by  death,  and  thus 
enabled  Him  to  carry  on  for  ever  a  priestly  work  in  the 
higher  sanctuary.  The  importance  of  this  heavenly  func- 
tion for  the  writer's  mind  is  cardinal.  But  it  too  is 
based  on  Sonship.  It  is  as  Son  that  Christ  intercedes 
(4^*  725  921^ .  g^g  gQj^  jjq  bears  the  once-made  sacrifice 
before  God  on  our  behalf  as  He  enters  the  holy  place ;  as 
Son  He  sits  down  on  the  right  hand  of  God  (1*),  heir  of 
all  things,  and  destined  to  appear  a  second  time  to  them 
that  wait  for  Him  (9^8).  Thus  the  eternity  and  perfection 
of  the  new  coveuaut  are  once  for  all  guaranteed  by  the 
fact  that  Christ  is  Son  of  God. 

Nevertheless,  the  antinomy  we  have  found  in  St.  Paul 
returns  also  in  the  Christology  of  Hebrews.  On  the 
one  hand,  the  Godhead  of  Christ  is  explicitly  asserted. 
The  Son  acts  as  Creator,  and  the  relations  of  created 
things  to  God  are  mediated  by  Him.  No  proof  is  given 
of  this,  which  is  in  itself  significant.      But  on  the  other 


THE   SUBORDINATION    OF    CHRIST  85 

hand,  the  Godhead  so  enunciated  is  compatible  with  real 
subordination.  Everywhere  the  Son  is  viewed  as 
dependent  on  the  Father — for  appointment  as  heir  of 
all  things  {V),  for  calling  as  High  Triest  (5^),  for 
resurrection  (IS^o),  for  exaltation  (l^^)  Jq  le  He  is 
described  without  qualification  as  "  the  first-bom."  Kot 
Christ,  but  God,  is  the  final  Judge  of  men.  The  Son's 
place  is  not  on,  but  on  the  right  hand  of,  the  throne  of 
God.  The  two  views  are  there  ;  and  they  must  simply 
be  acknowledged.  It  is  idle  to  refer  one  of  them  to 
Christ's  deity,  the  other  to  His  manhood.  As  Baur  has 
remarked,^  if  the  words  "  This  day  have  I  begotten  Thee  " 
(1^)  seem  to  define  Christ  as  posited  by  God's  will,  and 
therefore  in  a  sense  temporal  and  accidental,  the  metaphors 
of  1^  as  plainly  teach  that  the  relationship  is  one  of 
essential  nature.  This  may  of  course  be  criticised  un- 
favourably as  an  unmediated  conjunction  of  metaphysic 
and  history  in  which  justice  is  done  neither  to  the  logical 
character  of  speculation  nor  to  the  demands  of  exact 
historical  inquiry.  As  a  matter  of  fact,  the  duality  is 
simply  indissociable  from  the  Christian  view  of  Jesus. 
Faith  is  conscious  of  the  personal  presence  of  God  in  Him  ; 
it  is  therefore  inevitable  that  He  should  be  regarded  alike 
in  a  Divine  or  eternal  aspect — implying  somehow  a  real 
pre-existence — and  in  an  aspect  for  which  He  fulfils  His 
mission  under  the  conditions  of  time.  It  may  turn  out  that 
the  antinomy  is  insoluble  by  thought ;  but  the  writers  of 
the  New  Testament  at  least  obey  a  true  instinct  in 
affirming  both  estimates  even  if  the  grounds  of  their 
organic  unity  cannot  be  made  apparent. 

No  man  thinks  or  writes  in  a  vacuum,  and  there  can 
be  no  question  that  Hebrews  reveals  the  influence  of 
Alexandria,  that  crucible  of  all  creeds.  Some  of  the 
writer's  phrases  have  a  history  behind  them.  There  is  a 
significant  resemblance  between  his  description  of  the 
Son  and  epithets  applied  by  Philo  and  the  Book  of 
Wisdom  to  the  Logos  or  Wisdom  personified."^  Philo 
1  Neviest.  Theol.  237.  ^  Cf.  Holtzmann,  NT  Theologie,  ii.  294  f. 


86  THE    PERSON    OF   JESUS    CHRIST 

had  spoken  of  the  Logos  as  the  mediator  between  God 
and  man,  as  the  first-born  creature,  as  the  oldest  Son  of 
God,  as  the  organ  or  instrument  of  creation  and  providence. 
But  while  we  recognise  the  Alexandrian  vocabulary,  it  is 
quite  mistaken  to  infer  from  this  that  the  underlying 
system  of  ideas  is  in  each  case  the  same.  Philo  in  com- 
parison with  Hebrews  is  "  as  water  unto  wine."  In  Philo 
the  Logos  floats  vaguely  in  a  medium  which  is  neither 
personal  nor  impersonal,  as  the  unity  of  subordinate  logoi 
that  pervade  the  world  ;  the  soul  which  has  been  caught  up 
in  ecstasy  and  initiated  in  mystery  may  dispense  altogether 
with  the  Logos ;  God  is  impassably  severed  from  the  world 
by  a  gulf  the  Logos  only  can  bridge ;  and  at  no  point  is 
the  Logos  identified  with  the  Messiah.  But  in  Hebrews  the 
Messianic  Son — nowhere  designated  as  Logos — descends 
into  history  as  a  Redeemer,  and  through  a  career  of 
temptation,  death,  and  victory  becomes  the  great  High 
Priest  of  men,  by  whom  alone  we  come  to  God.  It  is 
clear  that  a  wholly  new  religious  interest  is  predominant. 
The  author  of  Hebrews  has  carried  over  to  Jesus  predicates 
and  epithets  drawn  from  the  cultured  phraseology  of  his 
time  which  appear  to  him  pre-eminently  suited  to  declare 
His  greatness.  With  a  sovereign  freedom  he  argues  that 
what  philosophy  has  aspired  to  is  given  in  Christ.  We 
must  not  make  him  responsible  for  more  than  this  verbal 
debt.  It  is  indeed  difficult  to  conceive  how  an  apostoHc 
writer  is  to  satisfy  a  certain  type  of  criticism.  Let  him 
create  a  new  world  of  ideas,  and  he  is  in  danger  of  being 
pronounced  unintelligible ;  let  him  use  the  categories  of 
his  day,  even  though  baptized  in  the  name  of  Christ,  and 
he  is  scouted  as  a  plagiarist  who  has  nothing  of  his  own 
to  say.  The  Christ  of  Hebrews  does  replace  the  Philonic 
Logos,  in  which  philosophy  had,  as  it  were,  been  dreaming 
of  a  Saviour ;  but  to  state  the  one  in  terms  of  the  other 
is  impossible. 

The  Christologies  of  St.  Paul  and  of  Hebrews  are 
similar  in  many  important  features.  Both  teach  that 
Christ  did  not  begin  to  be  at  His  earthly  incarnation,  but 


ST.    PAUL    AND    HEBREWS  87 

was  Mediator  of  creation  from   the  first;  and  in  each  case, 
the  argument  moves  in  a   regressive  direction,  from  His  [ 
exalted  glory  to  His  pristine  estate.      Both  teach  that  He  1 
has  reached  a  glory  far  above  men  and  angels  by  way  of/ 
the   cross ;  it  was   at   the  resurrection  that   for   the  first ' 
time — in  some  sense   as  reward — He  attained  to  a  mani-/ 
fested   greatness  which   was  His  always  by  right.      Both 
teach  His  true  Godhead  yet   real  subordination.      At  the 
same   time,  vital    differences  prove  that   as   constructions 
they  are  wholly  independent.     The  idea  of  High  Priest  has 
no  place  in  St.  Paul,  and  much  is  said  in  Hebrews  about 
our  Lord's  heavenly  ministry  to   which  in  St.  Paul  there 
answers  only  the  thought  of  intercession.     Hebrews  also 
brings  out  in  a  new  way — here  more  or  less  anticipating 
the  Fourth  Gospel — the  glory  of  Jesus'  life  on  earth,  with 
its  riches  of  acquired  sympathy.      If  in   St.  Paul  imitation  '' 
of  the   earthly  Jesus  is  swallowed  up  in   the  thought  of  / 
union  with  Christ  (cf.,  however,  1  Co   10^^^-),  in  Hebrews/ 
the  Leader  of  all  the  faithful  is  our  pattern  in  temptation/ 
who  endured  before  us  the  gainsaying  of  the  wicked,  andX 
suffered,  as  we  also  must  suffer,   without  the  gate.       In 
the  later  book  the  mystical  side  of  Paulinism  is  absent, 
even  from  3^*  and  6*,  and  thougli  the  writer  looks  forward 
to  the  Parousia,  there  is  no  suggestion,  as  in  1  Co  15^^"^^ 
of  a  future  when  Christ  will  abdicate,  and  His  Messianic 
reign  merge  in  the  absolute  dispensation  of  the  Father. 


CHAPTER  V. 

THE   CHRISTOLOGY   OF   THE    APOCALYPSE. 

The  view  of  Christ  which  inspires  the  Apocalypse  of  John 
— the  Domitianic  date  seems  proved — offers  a  pecuharly 
interesting  study  in  contrasts.  On  the  one  hand,  whatever 
be  its  sources,  the  book  is  now  rightly  regarded  as  the 
product  of  an  intensely  Jewish  form  of  Christianity.  To 
the  writer  Jesus  is  the  true  Messiah.  He  is  the  Lion 
of  the  tribe  of  Judah  (5^),  the  bright,  morning  Star,  the 
Eoot  and  Offspring  of  David  (22^^),  whose  destiny  it  is  to 
rule  the  nations  with  a  rod  of  iron  (5^^  etc.) — all  manifestly 
Old  Testament  predicates.  On  the  other  hand,  so  exalted 
is  another  vein  in  his  conception,  that  Bousset  speaks  of 
it  as  apparently  the  most  advanced  Christology  in  the 
New  Testament.  Nor  ought  we  too  hastily  to  assume 
that  this  is  due  to  Pauline  influence.  It  may  represent 
a  late  independent  branch  of  primitive  faith. 

Here  we  are  concerned  less  with  the  origins  of  the 
writer's  symbolism,  than  with  the  immense  significance 
he  has  forced  it  to  carry.  "  His  vision  of  Jesus,"  Dr. 
Moffatt  has  said,  "came  to  him  through  an  atmosphere 
of  truculent  and  fantastic  Messianism,  which  was  scarcely 
lucid  at  all  points,  and  which  tended  to  refract  if  not  to 
blur  the  newer  light."  The  inconsistencies  and  inequalities 
of  his  usage  "  are  mainly  due  to  the  fact  that  the  writer's 

Literature — Bousset,  Die  Offenharung  Johannis^,  1906  ;  Moffatt, 
"Revelation,"  in  the  Expositor's  Greek  Testament,  1910  ;  Porter,  Alcssages  of 
the  A2Jocaly2}tical  Writers,  1905  ;  Briggs,  Messiah  of  the  Apostles  ;  Peake, 
in  Mansfield  College  Essays,  1909 ;  Schmiedel,  Johannine  Writings, 
1908  ;  Titius,  Die  neutestamentliche  Lehre  von  der  Seligkeit,  Abtheil.  IV. 
1900. 

83 


MESSIANISM  89 

Christian  consciousness  repeatedly  tends  to  break  through 
forms  too  narrow  for  its  fuhiess.  Probably  the  materials 
at  the  author's  disposal  would  have  been  better  arranged 
had  this  been  anything  less  than  the  presentation  of  a 
living  Redeemer  in  heaven  as  the  Messiah  of  God's  people 
upon  earth.  The  mere  fact  that  the  Messiah  had  lived, 
involved  a  readjustment  of  Messianic  categories ;  the 
further  fact  that  he  had  suffered  and  risen  meant  that 
many  had  to  be  reshaped."^  It  is  the  heavenly  life  and 
activity  of  Christ  that  occupy  the  foreground,  although  the 
days  of  His  flesh  are  not  wholly  forgotten.  The  name 
"  Jesus "  occurs  five  times,  twice  in  the  now  familiar 
phrase,  "  Lord  Jesus."  Primitive  thought  is  revealed  in 
the  Judaistic  appellations  of  the  Messiah,  as  also  in  the 
Danielic  reminiscence,  "one  like  unto  a  son  of  man"  (14^^). 
Eschatological  forms  are  frequent.  The  Kingdom  will  be 
established  by  the  advent  of  Jesus,  not  by  the  develop- 
ment of  society.  The  past  is  His  ;  but  above  all  He  is 
herald  of  the  future,  ushering  in  the  day  of  final  triumph 
when  those  who  have  kept  His  testimony  shall  be  made 
priests  of  God  and  His  Christ,  and  reign  with  Him  a 
thousand  years.  His  vestments  in  1^^  are  priestly.  But 
the  seer's  favourite  title  for  Jesus  is  "  the  Lamb."  It 
occurs  twenty-nine  times  as  a  significant  and  touching 
index  of  His  redeeming  work  and  of  the  awed  yet  tender 
adoration  evoked  by  it,  for  the  blood  of  the  slain  Li  m 
which  purges  sin,  guarantees  to  all  the  faithful  a  like 
victory  through  suffering  and  death. 

Yet  all  memories  of  the  past  are  virtually  absorbed 
in  the  vision  of  Jesus'  heavenly  glory.  He  who  was  dead 
now  lives  to  bless  and  rule.  And  it  is  not  going  too  far 
to  say  that  the  song  uttered  in  His  praise  passes  upward 
from  point  to  point,  till,  in  all  essential  ways,  He  is 
frankly  identified  with  Godhead  and  fills  a  Divine  place. 
His  power  is  far  superior  to  the  angels.  Onmipotence, 
omniscience,  and  eternity  are  ascribed  to  Him.  He  is 
the  "  Living  One "  whose  conquest  of  the  tomb  gave  Him 

^  Expodlor's  Greek  Testament,  v.  297. 


90  THE   PERSON    OF   JESUS    CHRIST 

the  keys  of  death  and  Hades  (1^^);  like  Jehovah  (Ps  7®) 
He  searches  the  reins  and  the  hearts  with  eyes  like  a 
flame  of  fire  ;  the  seven  spirits  of  God  are  His ;  He  has 
power  to  unlock  the  secrets  of  human  destiny  (ch.  5) ;  and, 
in  the  Christophany  with  which  the  book  opens,  such  is 
the  godlike  and  overwhelming  radiance  of  His  person  that 
the  seer  falls  at  His  feet  as  dead.  He  is  source  and  end 
of  all  existing  things,  assuming  thrice  with  solemnity  the 
specifically  Divine  name,  "  the  First  and  the  Last,"  and 
the  impression  of  absolute  eternal  power  is  deepened  by 
the  additional  circumstance  that  the  words,  "  I  am  Alpha 
and  Omega,  the  beginning  and  end,"  spoken  by  God 
Himself  in  2P,  are  elsewhere  uttered  by  Jesus  (22^^)  in 
an  emphasised  form.  This  makes  it  virtually  certain 
that  He  is  ranked  with  God,  not  with  finitude,  in  such 
phrases  as  "  the  beginning  (or  principle)  of  the  creation 
of  God "  (3^*),  and  that  He  is  conceived  as  filling  this 
place  eternally,  not  merely  after  His  exaltation. 

Within  this  Divine  sphere,  His  relation  to  God  is 
that  of  Sonship.  In  the  letter  to  the  Church  of  Thyatira 
He  designates  Himself  "  Son  of  God,"  •  and  His  words 
make  reference  more  than  once  to  "My  Father"  (2^^  3^). 
Once  only  He  is  described  as  "the  Word  of  God"  (19^^), 
a  token  that  we  are  somewhere  within  the  range  of 
Johannine  and  Alexandrine  ideas.  Even  if  the  phrase  is 
not  an  interpolation,  however,  the  nature  of  the  context 
scarcely  invites  an  immediate  or  unconditional  identifica- 
tion with  the  Logos  as  conceived  in  the  Prologue  to  the 
Fourth  Gospel. 

Throughout  the  book  the  praise  of  this  Divine  person- 
ality is  echoed  passionately.  In  19^°  the  seer  is  bidden 
worship  God  only,  but  the  Apocalypse  as  a  whole  heaps 
proof  on  proof  that  already  the  adoration  of  Jesus  is 
a  distinctive  feature  of  Christian  religion,  this  earthly 
praxis  being  no  more  than  a  reflex  of  the  homage  paid 
on  high.  "  Unto  Him  that  loveth  us,  and  washed  us  from 
our  sins  by  His  blood  ...  to  Him  be  the  glory  and  the 
dominion  for  ever  and  ever  "  (1^-  ^).      This  is  closely  parallel 


THE    ADORATION    OF   JESUS  91 

to  the  doxology  in  7^^*^-,  wliich  is  •  addressed  to  God. 
Along  with  tliis  may  be  combined  two  salient  passages, 
5^^  and  7^°,  in  which  God  and  Christ  are  held  forth  as 
the  objects  of  a  single  intense  movement  of  adoration : 
"  Unto  Him  that  sitteth  upon  the  throne,  and  unto  the 
Lamb,  be  the  blessing,"  is  the  worship  offered  in  5^^  by 
the  totality  of  animated  creation ;  "  Salvation  unto  our 
God  which  sitteth  on  the  throne,  and  unto  the  Lamb,"  is 
in  7^°  the  song  of  the  great  multitude  of  the  redeemed, 
which  no  man  could  number.  In  both  instances  God  the 
Creator  and  Jesus  the  Eedeemer  are  exhibited  in  the  same 
indissociable  unity,  the  same  oneness  with  difference.  And 
with  this  representation  the  mystical  expressions  har- 
monise which  occur  in  the  beautiful  picture  of  the  heavenly 
Jerusalem  (21^-'^^),  regarding  which  it  is  said,  in  fulfil- 
ment of  the  Old  Testament  ideal,  that  "  the  Lord  God 
Almighty,  and  the  Lamb,  are  the  temple  thereof,"  and  again 
that  "  the  glory  of  God  did  lighten  it,  and  the  lamp  thereof 
is  the  Lamb."  This  last  verse  is  obviously  parallel  to  and 
a  reminiscence  of  Is  60^^:  "The  Lord  shall  be  unto  thee 
an  everlasting  light,  and  thy  God  thy  glory " ;  where  a 
recent  commentator  points  out  the  noteworthiness  of  the 
fact  that  in  the  closing  phrase  "  the  Lamb  "  occupies  the 
place  of  "  thy  God  "  in  the  prophecy.^  We  have  only  to 
read  the  seven  epistles  to  the  Churches  consecutively  to 
realise  with  a  vividness  scarcely  felt  in  any  other  part 
of  the  New  Testament  how  central,  incomparable,  and 
all-determining  is  the  place  of  Jesus  in  the  life  and  faith 
of  first-century  believers,  and  how  impossible  any  com- 
parison is  between  His  function  as  the  medium  and  as 
it  were  the  very  atmosphere  of  redemption  and  that  of 
any  other,  whether  prophet,  saint,  or  martyr.  Christ  does 
not  live,  as  we  do,  by  the  grace  of  God,  but  we  live  by 
the  grace  of  God  and  Christ.  A  monotheist  Jew,  of  the 
first  Christian  generation,  finds  himself  not  only  free, 
but  actually  bound,  to  identify  Christ  in  His  attributes 
with  God,  and  can  use  with  adoring  freedom  such 
^  Pi-ofessor  C.  A.  Scott,  Commentary  (Century  Bible),  294. 


92  THE    PERSON    OF   JESUS    CHRIST 

unparalleled  phrases  as  "  the  throne  of   God   and  of  the 
Lamb."  ^ 

As  in  the  rest  of  the  New  Testament,  the  tran- 
scendence of  Jesus — His  place  within  the  Divine  sphere — 
is  still  combined  with  a  view  of  His  person  as  subordinate 
to  God.  However  misleading  it  may  be  to  say,  as  Wernle 
does,  that  in  the  Apocalypse  Jesus  is  only  the  highest  in 
the  great  company  of  mediators ;  however  obvious  the 
author's  conviction  that  in  ascribing  praise  to  Jesus  he 
cannot  go  too  far  or  far  enough,  since  words  must  still 
fall  short ;  yet  this  Person,  alone,  unapproachable  and 
supreme,  is  yet  uniformly  presented  as  dependent  on  God 
the  Father.  In  the  opening  verse,  whatever  rendering 
we  choose,  it  is  made  clear  that  the  revelation  which  forms 
the  subject  was  given  to  Jesus  Christ  by  God.  And  in  3^^ 
Christ's  risen  glory  is  depicted  as  in  some  real  sense  the 
outcome  and  reward  of  His  earthly  fidelity,  for  He  promises 
to  all  who  overcome  a  share  in  His  own  acquired  royal 
power  and  judicial  dignity.  Lofty  as  His  position  is,  He 
still  reveals  Himself  as  the  exemplar  of  His  people.  To 
object,  as  some  writers  do,  that  it  is  only  because  Jesus 
is  not  God  that  He  can  be  conceived  as  the  pattern  of 
humanity,  and  that  the  naming  separately  of  Jesus  and 
God  virtually  disproves  the  author's  belief  in  His  Divine 
significance,  is  to  assume  the  very  matter  in  dispute. 
The  same  may  be  said  of  the  contention  that,  since  the 
gift  of  exaltation  is  conferred  on  Christ,  we  cannot  be 
meant  to  take  seriously  various  other  expressions  in  which 
His  original  divinity  appears  to  be  asserted.  Weiss  has 
pointedly  replied  to  this,  that  so  far  from  one  position 
neutralising  the  other,  it  really  furnishes  its  sufficient 
ground.  None  but  He  who  was  Divine  by  nature  could 
sit  upon  the  Divine  throne.^ 

'  It  is  not  as  if  the  author  had  decided  this  question  of  Christ-worship 
unreflectively.  The  issue  filled  his  whole  mind.  His  book  is  a  trumpet- 
call  to  Christians  to  worship  Jesus  and  refuse  to  worship  the  Roman 
Emperor  (of.  MofTatt,  op.  cit.  307-17). 

2  NT  Theology,  ii.  277. 


CHRIST    SUBORDINATE    TO    GOD  93 

Here,  then,  as  elscNvbere  in  the  apostolic  writings, 
the  Christian  view  of  Jesus  stands  firmly  on  a  founda- 
tion of  experience.  It  is  the  impression  made  by  the 
historic  Eedeemer  on  hearts  surrendered  to  Him,  joined 
to  the  consciousness  of  the  new  life  in  the  Spirit  which  He 
conveys  to  them  from  His  place  on  high.  To  this  Jesus 
belong  "  the  glory  and  the  dominion  for  ever  and  ever  " 
(1^).  No  one  knew  better  than  the  author  that  the 
Apocalypse  was  a  book  for  the  people,  not  for  the 
theologian,^  and  that  the  literary  and  mythological  details 
of  his  symbolism  have  no  unity  but  that  of  the  religious 
passion  which  employed  them.  "  The  writer's  Christology," 
it  has  been  said,  "  may  mingle  naively  archaic  elements 
like  the  lion  of  the  tribe  of  Judah,  or  the  iron  sceptre 
which  dashes  nations  in  pieces,  with  speculative  ideas  like 
the  first  principle  of  creation  or  the  eternal  Divine  word — 
it  matters  not.  What  his  work  reveals  is  that  Jesus  is 
practically  greater  than  any  or  all  these  ways  of  represent- 
ing Him ;  neither  the  imagination  of  the  Jew  nor  the 
philosophical  faculty  of  the  Greek  can  embody  Him ;  in 
the  faith  and  life  of  the  seer  He  has  an  importance  to 
which  neither  is  adequate;  the  only  true  name  for  Him 
is  one  which  is  above  every  name."^ 

^  Wemle  may  be  right  in  his  suggestion  {Anfange,  230)  that  the  book 
is  of  lay  origin. 

'  Denuey,  Jesus  and  the  Gos])el,  79, 


CHAPTER   VI. 

THE  JOHANNINE  CHRISTOLOGY. 

The  writer  of  the  Fourth  Gospel — on  the  evidence  it 
is  still  possible  to  regard  him  as  John  the  Apostle  ^ — 
has  explained  very  clearly  the  purpose  of  his  work.  In 
words  which  may  have  formed  the  conclusion  of  the  Gospel 
as  originally  composed,  he  declares  plainly :  "  These  are 
written  that  ye  might  believe  that  Jesus  is  the  Christ,  the 
Son  of  God,  and  that  believing  ye  might  have  life  through 
His  name"  (20^^).  He  felt  himself  to  be  in  line  with 
primitive  Christian  belief.  The  point  at  which  he  passed 
beyond  primitive  ideas  was  not  in  replacing  the  Messiah 
by  the  Logos,  but  in  perceiving  how  much  is  eventually 
implied  in  Messiahship,  Jesus'  Messianic  function  he 
construes  uniformly  in  terms  of  Divine  Sonship.  Or,  to 
put  it  otherwise,  he  formulates  Messiahship  in  categories 
more  universal  and  absolute,  working  back  to  those 
ultimate  presuppositions  which  were  best  fitted  to  impress 
the  wider  contemporary  intelligence. 

But  the  specifically  Messianic  interest  is  never  out  of 
sight.      Thus  in  chapter  1,  Andrew  reports  to  his  brother 

Literature — Scott,  The  Fourth  Gos2)el,  its  Purjwse  and  Theology,  1906  ; 
Drummond,  The  Character  and  Authorship  of  the  Fourth  Gospel,  1903  ; 
Sanday,  Criticism  of  the  Fourth  Gosjjel,  1905  ;  Liitgert,  Die  johanneische 
Christologie,  1899  ;  Bartli,  Lkis  Johannesevangelium  und  die  synoptischen 
Evangclien,  1905  ;  B.  Weiss,  Der  johanneische  Lehrhegriff,  1862  ;  Holtzmann, 
Hand-Kommentai^,  Bd.  iv.,  1910  ;  Titins,  Die  neutestamentliche  Lehre  von 
der  Seligkeit,  Abtlieil.  iii.,  1900  ;  Selimiedel,  Johannine  Writings,  1908  ; 
Heitniiiller  on  the  Fourth  Gospel  in  Die  Schriften  des  Ncuen  Testaments^ 
(ed.  J.  Weiss),  1907  ;  Kirn,  article  "  Logos,"  in  RE.  xi. 

^  This  is  not  meant  to  negate  the  possibility  that  a  later  editor  or  editors 
may  have  arranged  the  apostolic  material,  or  that  certain  passages  in  the 
Gospel  as  we  have  it  are  in  the  wrong  order. 

M 


MESSIANISM  95 

Simon  that  he  has  found  the  Christ,  and  Nathanael  hails 
Jesus  in  that  cliaracter  on  the  ground  of  His  preternatural 
knowledge.  The  woman  of  Samaria  also  is  convinced, 
while  a  similar  process  of  reasoning  goes  on  in  the  minds 
of  the  Jerusalem  populace,  as  revealed  in  their  question  : 
"  When  the  Christ  shall  come,  will  He  do  more  signs  than 
those  which  this  man  hath  done  ? "  (7^^).  The  works  of 
Jesus,  moreover,  are  characteristically  Messianic.  He 
comes  to  raise  the  dead,  to  bestow  the  Spirit  in  fulfilment 
of  the  ancient  promise,  to  receive  the  Lordship  of  all  things 
(3^^  16^^).  It  lies  with  Him  also  to  execute  judgment ; 
though,  as  has  been  pointed  out,  "  the  judgment  is  taken 
out  of  the  future,  and  carried  back  into  the  actual  life  of 
Christ,"  ^  an  earlier  conception  of  judgment  thus  being 
supplemented  by  the  notion  of  a  present  and  continued 
process.  His  miracles  are  placed  in  the  same  light,  but  it 
is  significant  of  St.  John's  profouuder  and  more  spiritual 
interpretation  that  outward  miracles  are  regarded  (5^°)  as 
but  the  signs  of  greater  works  still,  wrought  by  Jesus  in 
His  function  of  awakening,  animating,  judging,  and  illumin- 
ing the  souls  of  men.  He  is  represented,  in  short,  as 
exerting  a  delegated  but  competent  authority  such  as  only 
the  Messiah  could  assume.  But  the  Jewish  horizon  has 
vanished.  Whatever  Jesus  may  be  as  Christ,  He  is 
definitely  for  the  whole  world. 

The  writer  intentionally  selects  the  ijerson  of  Jesus  Christ 
as  the  subject-matter  of  his  Gospel.  Our  Lord's  conscious- 
ness of  His  relation  to  God,  His  transcendent  nature,  His 
willingness  to  communicate  eternal  life,  and  the  issues  of 
the  attitude  which  men  take  to  His  person — these  form  the 
real  centre  of  the  picture.  "  The  point  of  view,"  says 
Mathews,  "  is  certainly  not  that  of  the  Synoptic  Gospels, 
but  it  is  precisely  that  of  a  devoted  disciple,  who,  looking 
back  upon  the  career  of  his  Master  through  the  course  of 
years,  would  be  quick  to  see  how  constantly  Jesus  was  in 
reality  presenting  Himself   as  the  suliject  of  definition." ^ 

1  Scott,  Fourth  Gospel,  214. 
'  Messianic  Ho^e,  246. 


96  THE    PERSON    OF   JESUS    CHRIST 

The  relation  of  Father  to  Son  had  ah'eady  been  signalised  in 
a  great  Synoptic  passage  (Mt  11^'^)  in  terms  which  involve 
the  uniqueness  of  Jesus'  nature,  so  that  in  part  the  change 
of  emphasis  is  prepared  for.  At  the  same  time,  the  repre- 
sentation of  Christ  diverges  from  that  of  the  older  Gospels, 
in  so  far  as  the  Fourth  Gospel  represents  His  discourse  as 
revolving  almost  exclusively  round  His  own  person  and  the 
revelation  it  contains.  He  is  alike  the  subject  and  object 
of  His  message.  Thus  the  Gospel  opens  with  a  carefully 
constructed  Prologue,  the  purpose  of  which  is  to  affirm  the 
eternal  Godhead  of  the  personal  Word  who  became  flesh 
in  Jesus  Christ;  and  (if  chapter  21  is  by  a  later  hand) 
it  virtually  closes  on  the  same  note,  in  the  adoring  cry 
of  Thomas,  "My  Lord  and  my  God"  (2028).  In  great 
measure,  however,  the  distinction  between  the  two  readings 
is  that  of  fact  and  theory.  The  first  three  Gospels  had 
pictured  Christ  in  His  familiar  habit  among  men,  as  any 
onlooker  might  observe  Him ;  the  fourth  undertakes  to 
penetrate  behind  this  to  its  deeper  ground.  If  they  moved 
always  within  the  fact  of  Jesus'  human  life,  St.  John 
offers  an  articulated  view  of  the  relationship  of  Christ  to 
God,  when  followed  up  into  its  final  implications.^  Jesus 
is  the  Christ,  in  the  last  and  highest  sense  of  that  term, 
because  He  is  primarily  the  Eternal  Word  or  Son,  come 
forth  in  history  as  the  perfect  manifestation  of  the  Father. 
The  varied  elements  of  the  story — the  miracles  of  Jesus, 
His  sayings,  His  experiences — are  so  arranged  as  to  focus 
the  light  directly  on  this  Divine  truth.  Each  incident, 
each  discourse,  reveals  a  new  aspect  of  Jesus  as  the  Christ 
who  is  also  the  Incarnate  Son,  and  can  be  the  first  only 
because  He  is  the  second.  Constant  reference  to  this 
central  aim  lends  the  Gospel  its  singular  uniformity  of 
tone  and  language. 

'  Both  readings  are  inspired  by  religious  conviction.  St.  John's  interest 
in  the  Godhead  of  Jesus  Christ  was,  as  Mr.  Purchas  has  noted,  "  not  pliilo- 
sophical ;  it  was  intensely  practical.  To  him  Christianity  meant  the  love 
of  God  reaching  forth  and  stooping  down  to  men  wandering  in  darkness  " 
(Johannine  Problems,  101). 


THE   JOHANNINE    DISCOURSES  97 

As  regards  the  authenticity  of  the  Johannine  dis- 
courses, a  working  compromise  is  being  slowly  effected 
between  reasonable  men  on  both  sides.  A  few  scholars 
would  still  claim  for  the  evangelist  a  quite  literal 
exactitude.  At  the  other  extreme,  a  large  body  of  writers 
contend  that  the  teaching  of  Jesus  in  the  Fourth  Gospel 
is  really  an  expansion  in  philosophic  terms  of  an  estimate 
of  Jesus  which  has  virtually  no  point  of  contact  with 
the  person  known  to  us  from  the  Synoptics.  On  this 
view,  the  apostolic  authorship  is  out  of  the  question. 
Gradually,  however,  there  is  growing  up  a  mediating  party, 
who  are  more  or  less  prepared  to  waive  the  question  of 
authorship,  but  in  any  case  are  convinced  that  the 
Johannine  witness  of  Jesus  to  Himself  is  at  bottom  histori- 
cally trustworthy,  while  yet  His  actual  words  have  passed 
through  the  colouring  medium  of  the  writer's  personal 
reflection.  His  type  of  exposition,  so  unlike  that  of  the 
Synoptics,  is  due  to  his  having  thoroughly  worked  over  into 
his  own  style  his  recollections  of  what  Jesus  said  and  did. 
But  it  is  incredible  that  a  Christian  apostle  should  have 
taken  hberties  with  the  self-consciousness  of  Jesus.  We  may 
say  with  Haupt  that  the  teaching  of  Jesus  has  an  authentic 
commentary  bound  up  with  it,  or,  in  Burton's  admirable 
phrase,  that  the  Gospel  is  "  a  series  of  historical  sermons  " ;  ^ 
but  in  either  case  there  is  a  vital  accuracy.  The  pregnant 
pictorial  words  of  the  Synoptics  are  gone,  the  original 
matter  has  largely  been  melted  and  recast  in  memory,  yet 
we  feel  no  final  discrepancy  between  the  Master's  thought 
as  we  know  it  elsewhere  and  the  evangelist's  report  and 
exposition.  Truth  learnt  by  St.  John  and  the  Church 
around  him,  ere  the  close  of  the  apostolic  age,  was  felt 
to  have  lain  from  the  very  outset  in  Jesus'  words,  and  in 
the  light  of  this  perception  the  words  themselves  assumed 
a  new  aspect.  Thus  we  may  explain  the  comparative 
absence  of  development  alike  in  Jesus'  self-revelation  and 
the  apprehension  of  it  by  the  disciples.  Objects  really 
separate  in  time  merged  in  each  other  unawares ;  to  the 

^  Short  Introduction  to  the  Gospels,  128, 

7 


98  THE    PERSON    OF   JESUS    CHRIST 

evangelist    looking    back,    as    Dr.    Sanday    suggests,    the 
evolutionary  process  was  foreshortened.^ 

It  is  an  axiom,  therefore,  that  the  apostle's  view  of 
Christ  had  passed  through  a  rich  and  fruitful  process  of 
transformation.^     We  can   imagine  spiritual   forces  which 
may  well    have    produced    the    change.      Such    were    his 
fellowship  with  the  exalted  Lord ;    the   common  faith  of 
the   living    and    suffering   Church ;    the   challenge   of   the 
wistful    religious    longings   which    pervaded    the    Graeco- 
Eoman    world ;    not   least,   perhaps,   the    teaching   of    St. 
Paul,  with  which   he   must    have   been  familiar.      Unless 
experience  is  something  of  which  God  can  make  no  use, 
these  influences  must  have  operated  on  St.  John's  recol- 
lections of  the  historic  Jesus  and  have  tended  to  evoke 
an  ever  profounder  apprehension  of  His  supreme  religious 
significance.       The   Fourth  Gospel  is  then  fundamentally 
the  work  of  an  apostle,  who,  in  the  evening  of  life,  and  as 
a  protest  against  the  idealising  tendency  which  sought  to 
turn    Christianity   into  a  group   of    abstract    conceptions, 
made  known  to  the  Church  the  intuition  he  had  gained  of 
the  eternal  value  of  the  historic  Lord — His  unique  relation 
to  God  as  uncreated  Son,  His  relation  to  men  as  essential 
Life  and  Truth.     Throughout  he  strives  to  convey  the  total 
impression  of  this  Christ.     The  secret  of  his  Gospel  lies 
in  its  unique  combination  of  history  with  clear-sighted  faith. 
It  belongs  to  a  class  of  writings  which  may  be  described  as 
not  merely  historical  but  prophetic,  and  has  the  qualities 
rather  of  a  portrait  than  a  photograph.     As  it  has  been 
expressed  finely :    "  The  greatness  of    the   Fourth  Gospel 
consists  in  this,  that  it  takes  us  back  to  the  living  Person 
of  Jesus  as  the  ultimate  force  in  Christianity.     There  was 
a  danger  in  the  period  immediately  following  the  apostolic 
ao-e  that  the  relitjion  of  Christ  would  soon  cease  to  bear 
any  vital  relation  to  its  founder — John  perceived  that  a 
religion    thus     severed    from     Christ    Himself    would     be 
emptied  of  its  real  content  and  power.      It  was  the  life 

*  Criticism  of  the  Fourth  Gospel,  157. 

2  He  is  himself  conscious  of  this  ;  14-6  15M  jgisf.. 


THE    RETURN    TO    CHRIST  99 

which  had  been  the  Light  of  men."  ^  The  final  import  of 
the  historic  Personality  had  yet  to  be  set  forth ;  and 
St.  John,  essaying  this  task,  has  seized  the  inmost  truth  of 
Jesus'  self-consciousness  with  a  surer  grasp  even  than  the 
Synoptics.  Thus  the  difference  of  interpretation  is  after 
all  only  a  matter  of  degree.  There  is  a  close  affinity,  for 
instance,  between  the  Christology  of  the  Fourth  Gospel 
and  that  of  the  Second.^ 

As  a  whole  the  Johannine  picture  of  Christ  makes  on 
the  reader's  mind  an  impression  of  harmonious  and  sublime 
transcendence.  Inccssu  patet  deus ;  this  is  indeed  the  mien 
of  God  manifest  in  the  flesh.  At  the  same  time  it  is 
a  rather  unfortunate  mistake  to  regard  the  delineation 
of  Christ  as  out  of  touch  with  the  common  experience 
of  men.  To  say  that  the  Logos-Jesus  is  incapable  of 
human  weakness,  and  that  the  writer  has  obliterated  all 
traces  of  a  moral  struggle  in  His  life,  is  totally  misleading 
in  view  of  the  cry  for  deliverance  from  the  passion  in 
12"^^;  and  in  chapter  5,  where  Jesus  is  represented  as 
Judge,  it  is  noticeable  that  His  fulfilment  of  the  office  is 
made  wliolly  dependent  on  His  obedience  to  the  Father. 
"  I  can  of  Myself  do  nothing ;  as  I  hear,  I  judge "  (o^^). 
The  real  fact  is  that  manifestations  of  the  humanity  of 
Jesus  are  recorded  with  greater  vividness  in  the  Fourth 
Gospel  than  in  any  of  the  first  three.^  He  is  shown  to  us 
wearied  at  Jacob's  well,  weeping  beside  the  grave  of 
Lazarus,  grateful  for  the  companionship  of  the  Twelve, 
anticipating  the  cross  with  alternate  shrinking  and  desire, 
athirst  on  Calvary,  and  bearing,  even  after  the  resurrection, 
the  marks  of  the  spear  and  the  nails.  He  is  bound  to  His 
fellows  by  ties  of  blood.     He  is  guest  with  His  family  at 

1  Scott,  0}}.  cit.  291. 

2  Cf.  J.  Weiss,  Das  dltcste  Evavgelium,  42-47. 

2  Cf.  Weizsiicker,  Jahrhi'icher  fur  dexdsche  Theologie,  1857,  175; 
Druramond,  Character  and  Authorship  of  the  Fourth  Gospel,  422  f. 
Professor  F.  C.  Burkitt  has  said  that  "in  no  early  Christian  document 
is  the  real  humanity  of  Jesus  so  emphasised  as  in  the  Fourth  Go.spel " 
{Gospel  History  and  its  Transmission,  233). 


100  THE   PERSON    OF   JESUS    CHRIST 

a  wedding-party,  receives  advice  as  to  His  conduct,  cares 
for  His  mother  with  His  latest  breath.  He  offers  prayer. 
He  is  subject,  moreover,  to  the  limits  of  earthly  experience  ; 
for  although  more  than  once  very  remarkable  knowledge  is 
attributed  to  Him,  yet  definite  details,  such  as  His  inquiry 
regarding  the  place  of  Lazarus'  tomb,  make  it  impossible  to 
say  that  He  is  depicted  as  omniscient. 

His  oneness  of  nature  with  us  is  specially  exhibited  in 
His  uniform  dependence  on  God.  He  prays  to  God  as  His 
Father,  and  gives  thanks  that  His  prayer  is  always  heard 
(11*^).  The  will  of  God  is  throughout  the  source  and 
background  of  His  mission  to  the  world.  Consecrated  and 
sent  by  the  Father  (lO^e),  He  speaks  only  those  things 
which  He  has  seen  and  heard  of  Him,  or,  as  it  is  expressed 
in  one  place,  "  as  the  Father  hath  taught  Me  "  (S^^).  He 
is  in  fact  a  commissioned  deputy  to  whom  both  words 
and  works  have  been  "given."  His  higher  knowledge 
is  described  as  being  His  by  communication,  and  He 
confesses  that  He  can  do  nothing  of  Himself  but  that 
which  He  sees  the  Father  do  (5^^).  Knowledge  and 
power  equally  are  mediated  through  the  Spirit.  Not  only 
so;  His  relation  to  God  is  somehow  conditioned  by  His 
moral  attitude.  "  He  that  sent  Me  is  with  Me  ;  He  hath 
not  left  Me  alone  ;  for  I  do  always  the  things  that  are 
pleasing  to  Him"  (8^9);  and  again:  "therefore  doth  the 
Father  love  Me,  because  I  lay  down  My  life"  (lO^^).  But 
this  human  dependence,  on  the  other  hand,  is  no  mere 
commonplace  fact  which  might  have  simply  been  taken 
for  granted:  it  is  of  the  essence  of  this  unique  life;  it 
flows  ultimately  from  His  special  and  unshared  Sonship, 
and  is  the  form  of  that  special  Sonship  under  the  conditions 
of  human  experience.  That  He  should  do  Divine  works  on 
earth  results  from  His  singular  relation  to  the  Father. 
The  power  necessary  for  His  vocation  is  given  from  day 
to  day,  but  it  is  only  because  He  is  Son  that  He  can 
receive  it. 

While  therefore  the  mutual  love  and  knowledge  of 
Father  and   Son   are   insisted  on,  the  relationship  is   not 


THE    HUiMANITY    0^'   JEGUS  L0> 

such  as  to  involve  a  simple  equality.  The  Son  is  dependent 
at  each  point  on  the  Father,  but  it  would  be  gravely 
unfaithful  to  St.  John's  interpretation  to  speak  of  the 
Father  as  being  dependent  on  the  Son.  There  remains  a 
true  subordination,  a  human  subjection  and  (as  it  were) 
inferiority,  on  Jesus'  side.  What  has  frequently  been 
missed,  however,  is  that  this  subordination  is  depicted 
as  expressing  itself  in  modes  which  are  purely  ethical. 
It  is  mediated,  that  is,  by  authentic  human  motives, 
desires,  prayers,  acts  of  submission  and  compliance,  and 
nothing  could  be  more  inaccurate  than  to  regard  it  as 
necessitated  by  the  inherent  properties  of  a  metaphysical 
Divine  "  substance  "  or  as  illustrating  the  rigid,  self-acting 
categories  of  an  A  priori  ontology.  To  assert  that  "  the 
moral  attributes,  trust,  pity,  forgiveness,  infinite  sympathy, 
are  replaced  by  certain  metaphysical  attributes,  which  are 
supposed  to  belong  more  essentially  to  the  Divine  nature," 
is  not  to  interpret  what  the  evangelist  has  written,  but 
to  impose  on  him  an  erroneous  modern  theory.  It  is  a 
reading  of  the  facts  wholly  out  of  keeping  with  the 
character  of  One  who,  when  exhorting  the  disciples  to 
keep  His  commandments,  could  promise  that  thereby  they 
would  abide  in  His  love,  "  even  as  I  have  kept  My  Father's 
commandments,  and  abide  in  His  love"  (lo^*^),  and  who,  in 
another  place,  is  presented  as  entreating  the  Father  to  glorify 
Him  with  the  glory  which  had  been  His  before  the  world 
was  (17^).  Metaphysical  attributes,  in  any  sense  in  which 
they  are  represented  as  opposed  to  ethical  attributes,  are 
irrelevant  to  such  a  situation.  All  the  predicates  affirmed 
of  Jesus  by  Himself  are  of  a  fundamentally  religious  type ; 
they  are  meant  to  state  personal  relations  humanly,  so 
that  human  souls  may  lay  hold  upon  the  only  true  God 
in  His  Son,  Jesus  Christ  (17^).  The  Christ  of  the  Fourth 
Gospel,  then,  is  truly  man,  one  with  us  in  all  points, 
except  sin.  The  secret  of  His  uniqueness  lies  in  an  un- 
paralleled relation  to  the  Father.  Men  can  be  children 
of  God  only  by  the  new  birth  ;  Jesus  is  the  Son  of  God 
by  eternal  nature.      This  combination  of  personal  unique- 


i02  THE    PERSON    OF   JESUS    CHEIST 

ness  with  human  dependence  is  put  very  strikingly  in 
5-^,  where  each  side  is  brought  out  alternately :  "  As  the 
Father  hath  life  in  Himself,  even  so  gave  He  to  the  Son 
also  to  have  life  in  Himself."  The  power  to  impart  life 
is  a  derived  power ;  on  the  other  hand,  as  imparting  it, 
Jesus  is  for  men  that  which  none  can  be  save  God — the 
source  of  life  eternal.  In  like  manner,  He  does  nothing 
but  what  He  sees  the  Father  do,  yet  He  does  the  same 
works  as  the  Father. 

Like  the  Synoptic  writers,  the  Fourth  evangelist 
represents  Jesus  as  seeking  by  human  fellowship  to  train 
the  disciples  into  a  spiritual  conception  of  His  purpose. 
By  degrees,  under  His  influence,  they  became  aware  that 
the  gift  He  desired  to  impart  was  Divine  and  universal, 
namely,  the  possession  of  perfect  life  in  union  with  Himself. 
A  crucial  stage  in  their  progress  is  dated  from  St.  Peter's 
words :  "  We  have  believed  and  know  that  Thou  art  the 
Holy  One  of  God "  (6^^) ;  and  it  is  a  significant  minor 
detail,  testifying  to  the  substantially  historical  character  of 
the  narrative,  that  there  is  no  intrusion  at  this  point  of 
the  ideas  of  the  Logos  or  the  eternal  Sonship.^  The 
disciples  are  coming  to  recognise  the  Messiah,  but,  as  they 
rise  to  a  religious  point  of  view,  the  name  is  assuming  a 
new  content. 

The  distinctive  name  of  Jesus  in  the  Fourth  Gospel, 
however,  is  "  the  Son  of  God,"  or,  more  briefly  and  simply, 
as  in  the  Synoptics,  "  the  Son."  At  least  thirty  times  He 
employs  the  phrase  "  My  Father,"  on  nine  occasions  when 
speaking  to  God  directly ;  seventeen  times,  by  the  lowest 
estimate,  He  designates  Himself  "  Son  "  or  "  Son  of  God." 
In  the  Johannine  writings,  and  throughout  the  New  Testa- 
ment as  a  whole,  the  primary  reference  of  this  name  is  clearly 
enough  to  the  historic  Person,  known  and  remembered 
within  the  domain  of  human  fact.      So  far  then  it  denotes 

^  Those  who  regard  the  Fourth  Gospel  as  a  pliilosophical  romance  or  a 
thesis  in  theology  may  still  do  well  to  read  the  essay  apjiended  by  Renan 
to  his  Fie  de  Jisus  (ed.  13). 


THE   SON    OF    GOD  103 

our  Lord  as  one  who  held  towards  God  a  unique  relation- 
ship of  intimacy  and  love,  manifested  in  entire  obedience 
to  His  will.  This  aspect  of  the  matter  we  have  had 
occasion  to  study  closely,  and  at  present  we  need  not 
dwell  on  it. 

But  as  one  who  loved  ultimate  conceptions,  St.  John 
felt  the  inadequacy  of  this,  and  he  pressed  on  to  eluci- 
date its  absolute  eternal  ground.  He  does  so  in  the 
first  place  by  expounding  the  witness  of  Christ  to  the 
identity  of  nature  subsisting  between  Himself  and  the 
Father.  That  nothing  less  august  than  such  a  unity 
is  meant  may  be  gathered  from  the  charge  made  by 
the  Jews  against  His  claim  to  special  Sonship,  namely,  that 
He  made  Himself  equal  with  God  (5^8  10^^).  In  S^^-^o 
this  identity  or  parallelism  is  drawn  out  in  considerable 
detail,  only  a  faint  allusion  being  made  to  the  subordina- 
tion of  the  Son  ;  the  Father  and  Jesus  are  one  in  quicken- 
ing power,  in  authority  to  judge,  in  worthiness  to  be  adored. 
It  is  a  remarkable  passage,  the  distinctive  note  of  which 
is  audible  in  the  words,  "  that  all  may  honour  the  Sou, 
even  as  they  honour  the  Father."  This  unique  relation 
of  Son  to  Father  is  elsewhere  described  by  the  term 
"  only-begotten "  (o^^),  joined  to  and  explained  by  the 
phrase,  "  who  is  in  the  bosom  of  the  Father  "  (1^^).  Shades 
of  meaning  but  faintly  discernible  in  the  Christology  of 
St.  Paul  are  thus  deepened  and  intensified.  Sonship  is 
defined  in  its  highest  terms.  The  Son  is  of  the  same 
nature  as  the  Father,  Divine  powers  and  qualities  devolving 
on  Him  in  virtue  of  His  inherent  birthright.  Yet  His 
possession  of  these  powers  is  seen  so  steadily  from  the 
ideal  or  timeless  point  of  view  that  it  nowhere  cancels 
the  element  of  weakness  and  restriction  inseparable  from 
the  personal  presence  of  the  Son  in  human  life. 

At  various  points  the  writer  opens  up,  beyond  this 
unity  of  Father  and  Son,  a  vista  of  its  eternal  character. 
He  transcends  the  first  three  Gospels  by  insistiog  on 
the  fact  that  the  Sonship  of  Christ  is  increate  and  un- 
beginning,    the    presupposition   of    all   time    and    history. 


104  THE    PERSON    OF   JESUS    CHRIST 

In  the  beginning  (1^,  cf.  Gn  1^)  He  had  been  the  Word 
with  the  Father.  Ere  coming  from  heaven  He  had  lived 
a  life  somehow  characterised  by  spiritual  relationships 
(17^);  it  was  not  some  impersonal  moment  or  tendency 
in  God  which  had  taken  flesh  and  dwelt  among  men,  but 
the  Son,  eternal  object  of  the  Father's  love  (17=^*),  and 
possessed  thereby  of  a  perfect  knowledge  of  the  Father 
which  was  capable  of  reproducing  itself  in  His  earthly 
consciousness.  As  one  whose  place  is  in  the  Father's 
bosom  (1^^),  He  presents  God  in  propria  p)crsona.  He 
knows  God  thus  because  He  has  always  known  Him  so. 
"  I  speak  the  things  which  I  have  seen  with  My  Father  " ; 
"  no  man  hath  ascended  into  heaven,  but  He  that  descended 
out  of  heaven."  Numerous  other  salient  passages  dwell 
on  this  prior  life  of  Sonship.  To  the  Jews'  question 
where  He  will  go  that  they  cannot  come,  He  answers, 
"I  am  from  above"  (8^^).  In  the  mysterious  declaration, 
"  Before  Abraham  was,  I  am  "  {^^^),  the  tense  is  apparently 
chosen  to  denote,  as  far  as  human  speech  permits,  the 
timeless  and  unbecoming  eternity  of  His  inmost  being. 
And  in  the  upper  room,  He  speaks  to  the  Father  of  "  the 
glory  which  I  had  with  Thee  before  the  world  was"  (17^), 
and  prays  that  it  may  be  restored  to  Him.  Yet  the 
main  object  of  these  statements  is  not  to  make  certain 
speculative  predications,  in  a  so-called  metaphysical  interest, 
but  to  exhibit  Jesus  as  the  final  revelation  of  the  Father. 
This  is  the  pivotal  and  organising  idea  in  St.  John's 
theology.  We  can  see  the  conviction  in  his  mind  that 
none  can  reveal  perfectly  save  He  who  is  that  which  He 
reveals.  In  His  essential  love,  accordingly,  the  Father 
has  poured  forth  His  being  in  Jesus,  that  a  perishing 
world  may  have  life  through  Him.  "  Belie  vest  thou  not," 
Jesus  asks,  "  that  I  am  in  the  Father  and  the  Father  in 
Me  ?  The  words  that  I  say  unto  you  I  speak  not  from 
Myself :  but  the  Father  abiding  in  Me  doeth  His  works  " 
(1410). 

It  has  been  urged  that  Jesus'  claim  to  a  pre-existent 
knowledge  of   God   must    reduce   His    earthly  experience 


JESUS    THE    FINAL    REVELATION  105 

to  mere  semblance.  Could  He  learn  what  previously 
He  had  known  ?  On  the  other  hand,  are  we  prepared 
to  conceive  the  life  of  God  and  of  man  as  so  totally 
disparate  in  ethical  and  spiritual  character  that  what 
pertains  by  origin  to  the  one  may  not  reproduce  or 
mediate  itself  organically  in  and  through  the  other  ? 
Are  divinity  and  humanity  to  be  thus  defined  by  mutual 
exclusion  ?  If  not,  there  may  be  nothing  self-contra- 
dictory in  the  view  that  Jesus'  knowledge  of  God  was 
experimental  in  kind  —  mediated,  that  is,  by  the  un- 
measured gift  to  Him  of  the  Spirit,  as  acting  on  and 
interpreting  to  His  mind  the  normal  development  of  His 
own  life — while  yet  its  deepest  fount  lay  in  His  eternal 
being  as  the  Son.  To  take  the  parallel  case  of  love, 
it  is  a  frequent  suggestion  in  the  Fourth  Gospel  that 
Jesus,  though  loved  eternally  as  Son,  keeps  Himself 
in  the  love  of  God  by  doing  His  will.  "This  is  an 
assertion  of  the  ultimate  truth,  that  the  union  of  Jesus 
with  God  depends  on  moral  conditions ;  not  that  through 
His  conduct  He  had  in  the  first  instance  to  gain  His 
Father's  love — it  was  there  from  the  beginning — but  that 
He  can  retain  it  only  on  the  one  condition,  that  He  makes 
the  will  of  God  His  own."^  In  some  such  way  we  may 
conceive  His  earthly  realisation  of  the  perfect  knowledge 
of  God.  Apart  from  a  theory  more  or  less  on  these  lines, 
the  evangelist  must  have  held  that  either  no  continuity 
or  no  difference  obtained  between  the  pre-existence  of  the 
Son  and  His  earthly  life.  Humanitarianism  or  docetism 
would  have  been  forced  upon  him. 

The  conclusions  at  which  we  arrive  regarding  the 
historic  accuracy  of  the  Johannine  discom-ses  is  of  course 
to  be  applied  also  to  Jesus'  recorded  words  about  His  pre- 
temporal  being.  It  would  seem  that  these  words  were 
uttered  in  exalted  hours  of  feeling,  when  our  Lord's  self- 
consciousness  expanded  to  a  length  and  depth  and  height 
that  passes  understanding.  As  we  listen,  we  hear  only 
the  plunge  of  the  lead  into  unfathomable  waters.  It  is 
^  J.  Weiss,  Christ :  the  Beginnings  of  Dogma,  156. 


106  THE    PERSON    OF   JESUS    CHRIST 

possible,  and  we  have  to  allow  for  the  possibility  in 
our  interpretation,  that  lapse  of  time  may  have  altered 
light  and  shade  in  the  apostle's  memory.  One  feels  it 
scarcely  credible  that  Jesus  should  have  spoken  on  the 
subject  so  often  or  so  clearly  as  to  be  at  once  intelligible 
to  the  great  bulk  of  His  auditors ;  for  otherwise  the 
silence  of  the  first  three  Gospels  is  enigmatic.  On  the 
other  hand,  while  He  may  have  displayed  a  marked 
reticence  on  this  theme,  as  on  that  of  His  Messiahship,  we 
have  reason  to  believe  that  He  spoke  regarding  the 
antecedents  of  His  life  on  earth  with  such  significance 
that  the  brooding  evangelist  later  became  conscious  of 
the  claim  to  pre-existence  implied  in  His  words  ;  a  pre- 
existence  not  of  an  ideal  type,  but  real  and  personal. 

The  last  stage  of  Jesus'  reported  interpretation  of  Son- 
ship  is  represented  by  His  prediction  of  the  glory  to  be 
resumed  by  Him  after  death,  and  of  His  abiding  spiritual 
presence  with  the  disciples  (ch.l3  ff.).  Eesurrection  would 
mark  His  entrance  on  a  larger,  unseen  life,  free  from  the 
limits  of  time  or  space,  and  this  involved  a  change  in  the 
dignity  of  Jesus'  person  at  least  in  the  sense  that  it 
conferred  on  Him  an  omnipresence  and  universality  of 
influence  He  had  lacked  on  earth.  We  have  seen  that 
Sonship,  in  initial  content,  was  a  relation  with  God  of 
unequalled  love  and  intimacy.  This  is  what  we  already 
find  in  the  Synoptics :  though  even  there,  as  Titius  has 
remarked,  the  absolute  tone  with  which  the  name  Son 
is  used  in  Mt  ll^^ff-  naturally  suggests  a  more  tran- 
scendent background  of  meaning.^  But  now  the  Fourth 
Gospel  proclaims  that  Jesus  as  the  Son  is  eventually 
to  share  in  the  omnipotence  and  absoluteness  of  God 
Himself.  Thus  in  the  deliberately  chosen  language  of 
133 :  "Jesus,  knowing  that  the  Father  had  given  all  things 
into  His  hands,  and  that  He  came  forth  from  God,  and 
goeth  unto  God,"  there  is  no  convincing  reason  for  re- 
stricting "  all  things "  to  the  sphere  of  perfect  revelation, 
so  as  to  exclude  omnipotence  in  the  full  sense.      Nor  is  it 

'  Jesu  Lehre  vom  Reich  Gottes,  118. 


THE    FUTURE    GLORY    OF    THE    SON  107 

easy  to  grasp  tlie  philosophical  position  of  those  who  quote 
such  a  verse  in  confirmation  of  the  view  that  in  the  New 
Testament  Christ  is  made  absolute  Lord  of  the  Church 
merely,  not  of  the  universe.  We  cannot  break  up  reality 
in  unrelated  parts.  The  absolute  Lordship  of  the  exalted 
Christ  is  the  starting-point  of  all  New  Testament  writers. 
Some  of  them  refrain  from  theologising  on  the  matter, 
but  to  St.  John,  as  he  sought  an  explanation  for  his  own 
mind,  its  reality  appeared  in  complete  harmony  with 
Jesus'  intimations  of  His  own  pre-existence.  Why  (he  felt) 
should  not  One  who  had  shared  the  very  glory  of  God 
Himself  share  it  once  again  ?  He  had  mediated  in  the 
creation  of  all  things  from  the  beginning ;  He  had  come 
to  His  own,  though  they  received  Him  not  (1^^);  it  was 
fitting,  therefore,  that  He  should  be  their  Lord  and 
Master  after  the  resurrection.  Hence  the  Divine  power 
to  which  Jesus  ascends  is  in  no  way  incommensurate  with 
His  nature,  overwhelming  (as  it  were)  a  finite  form  with  an 
infinite  content ;  still  less  is  it  the  prize  of  usurpation. 
It  is  the  Father's  gift,  bestowed  in  consequence  of  Jesus' 
fidelity  in  the  work  given  Him  to  do  (17*-^),  and  fitly 
answering  to  His  essential  beinf^. 

But  the  resurrection  is  past  before  the  truth  of  Jesus' 
greatness  has  dawned  on  His  followers.  The  wonderful 
scene  which  culminates  in  Thomas'  cry  of  adoration 
(20--^)  portrays  the  experience  of  one  on  whom  the  dis- 
covery has  just  broken,  and  whose  eyes  are  blinded  with 
excess  of  light.  In  the  risen  Jesus,  fresh  with  victory 
from  the  grave,  the  apostle  discerns  the  very  Lord  of 
glory ;  and  perceiving  in  a  flash  of  joy  and  peace  that  all 
he  had  sought  for  in  the  Father  has  been  vouchsafed  to 
men  in  the  Son,  he  grasps  the  person  of  Jesus  as  possess- 
ing for  faith  the  value  and  the  reality  of  God.  If  his 
reported  words  mean  anything,  they  mean  an  ascription 
to  Christ  of  Divine  prerogatives,  they  salute  Him  as 
the  medium  and  vehicle  of  that  life  which  is  found 
only  in  the  Eternal.  There  has  been  a  manifestation 
of   God   in  human  form.     Faith   in   Jesus   Christ,  aware 


108  THE    PERSON    OF    JESUS    CHRIST 

of    its    own    significance,    becomes    an    explicit    faith    in 
His  divinity. 

Our  conclusions  up  to  this  point  are  on  the  whole 
confirmed  by  St.  John's  usage  of  the  title  "  Son  of  man." 
It  is  a  striking  minor  detail  that,  as  in  the  Synoptics, 
this  name  is  employed  solely  by  Jesus.  It  occurs  some 
twelve  times.  But  the  accent  has  shifted  slightly  from 
His  vocation  to  His  person ;  so  that  by  using  the  phrase 
in  harmony  with  his  lofty  view  of  our  Lord's  nature,  the 
evangelist  strives  to  bring  out  the  uniqueness  of  Jesus'  person- 
ality. As  in  the  first  three  Gospels,  we  can  still  trace  its 
primitive  Messianic  sense.  Thus  in  12^* — a  question  put 
by  the  multitude — "  Christ "  and  "  Son  of  man  "  are  used 
indifferently.  In  the  Synoptics,  as  we  have  seen,  two 
types  of  passage  occur  in  which  Jesus  speaks  of  the  "  Son  of 
man  " ;  they  are  allusions  either  (a)  to  His  earthly  work, 
and  especially  to  His  passion,  or  (&)  to  the  glory  of  His 
Parousia.  Taking  the  inverse  order,  it  appears  that  although 
the  name  is  nowhere  in  the  Fourth  Gospel  put  in  relation 
to  the  Second  Coming,  the  majority  of  passages  where 
it  occurs  refer  quite  specifically  to  Jesus'  exaltation  (.3^^ 
6*^2  etc.)  or  to  His  being  glorified  (12-^  13^^).  It  is 
implied  that  transcendent  glory  awaits  the  Son  of  man, 
and  befits  His  person ;  and  this  is  plainly  an  expansion 
of  one  side  of  the  Synoptic  idea.^  The  second  type  of 
Synoptic  allusion,  dealing  with  Jesus'  work  on  earth  and 
with  the  passion  it  involves,  is  also  represented  in  the  Fourth 
Gospel.  It  is  represented,  for  example,  by  sayings  which 
describe  the  Son  of  man  as  giving  meat  that  endureth  to 
everlasting  life  (6^'''),  or  attach  eternal  life  to  eating  His 
flesh  and  drinking  His  blood  (6^^),  or  declare  that  He 
must  be  "  lifted  up  "  (3^*). 

It  will  be  observed  that  this  Johannine  usage 
retains  that  element  of  paradoxical  contrast  whicli  we 
found  to  be  characteristic  and  indeed  constitutive  of  the 
title   in   the   Synoptics,  even   though    the   facts    are    con- 

^  Cf.  Ewcalil,  Die  Evangelienfrage,  43-47. 


THE    SON    OF    MAN  109 

templated  from  a  slightly  di  fife  rent  point  of  view. 
Certain  scholars  have  maintained  that  the  original  signi- 
ficance of  tlie  name  is  well-nigh  inverted  in  the  Fourth 
Gospel,  but  a  careful  scrutiny  of  the  data  scarcely  bears 
this  out.  What  is  undeniable,  however,  is  that  in  St.  John 
the  title  "  Son  of  man "  seems  always  to  convey  the 
suggestion  faintly  that  for  Jesus  it  is  an  amazing  thing 
that  He  should  be  man  at  all.  He  was  man  indeed,  like 
His  brethren ;  yet  in  this  humanity  there  resided  a  Divine 
content  which  gave  Him  a  place  apart.  Or,  as  it  may  be 
put  otherwise,  the  human  aspect  of  His  life  is  not  the 
primary  and  original  aspect ;  He  came  into  humanity 
from  a  higher  realm.  His  disciples  may  eat  His  flesh 
and  drink  His  blood,  for  He  is  to  pass  through  death, 
dying  as  only  man  can  die  ;  yet  only  one  who  was  more 
than  man  could  thus  dwell  in  believers  as  their  inward  life. 
Similarly,  it  is  the  Son  of  man  who  is  to  be  lifted  up,  not 
on  the  cross  merely,  but  by  exaltation.  On  the  one  hand, 
this  implies  His  inherent  Divine  transcendence,  which  alone 
makes  such  exaltation  conceivable  ;  on  the  other,  it  pre- 
supposes His  real  manhood,  since  exaltation  comes  by  way 
of  death.  Thus  so  far  from  the  title,  as  used  in  the  Fourth 
Gospel,  containing  no  reference  to  Jesus'  higher  claims, 
it  invariably  connotes  these  loftier  antecedents  as  the  foil 
or  background  against  which  the  fact  of  His  true  humanity 
is  placed.  We  cannot  eliminate  the  duality.  As  it  has 
been  expressed :  "  In  several  passages  the  contrast  is  ex- 
pressly marked  between  the  present  revelation  of  Jesus  as 
Son  of  man  and  the  true  glory  of  His  Divine  nature.  .  .  . 
The  significance  of  the  name  in  all  these  verses  lies  in 
the  suggestion  that  the  human  nature  of  Christ  was 
united  with  a  higher  nature  which  was  present  in  it 
even  now,  and  would  at  last  become  fully  manifest."^ 
This  note  of  contrast  never  seems  to  fail.  The  Son  of 
man,  in  all  points  authentically  human,  has  heaven  open 
to  Him  perpetually,  and  will  yet  ascend  up  again  where 
He  was  before  (6^"^).  Hence  it  is  not  going  too  far  to 
'  Scott,  Fourth  Gospel,  184  (?). 


110  THE    PERSON    OF   JESUS    CHRIST 

say  that  no  appreciable  distinction  can  be  drawn  in  the 
Fourth  Gospel  between  what  is  predicated  of  the  Son  of 
man  and  of  the  Son  of  God.  Both  names,  originally 
Messianic,  are  raised  to  the  highest  power.  If  the  one 
denotes  the  eternal  origin  of  Christ  in  God,  the  other 
points  to  His  human  affiliation  but  connects  it  with  a 
higher  being  with  which  it  is  significantly  contrasted. 
This  suggestion  of  a  Divine  transcendence  is  the  distinctive 
feature  which  St.  John  adds  to  the  Synoptic  view. 

The  Christ-mysticism  of  the  Fourth  Gospel  has  always 
been  regarded  as  casting  a  revealing  light  upon  its  final 
interpretation  of  Jesus'  person.  We  can  scarcely  over- 
estimate the  importance  for  the  evangelist's  mind  of 
this  conception  of  mystic  union,  by  which  believers  are 
made  partakers  in  the  higher  life  streaming  to  them  from 
Jesus.  The  doctrine  is  central  in  more  than  one  of  the 
great  discourses.  "  I  am  the  living  bread  which  came 
down  out  of  heaven ;  if  any  man  eat  of  this  bread,  he 
shall  live  for  ever "  (6^^)  ;  "  I  am  the  vine,  ye  are  the 
branches ;  he  that  abideth  in  Me,  and  I  in  him,  the  same 
beareth  much  fruit"  (15^);  "I  in  them,  and  Thou  in  Me, 
that  they  may  be  perfected  into  one"  (17^^).  It  is  worth 
noting  that  this  vital  fellowship  is  nowhere  described  in 
the  Fourth  Gospel  as  being  mediated  by  the  Spirit,  though 
in  the  First  Epistle  expressions  are  found  which  distinctly 
point  that  way  (3^*  4^^).  At  the  same  time  we  observe 
that  the  idea  of  life-union  with  Christ  is  unmistakably 
connected  with  His  exaltation.^  It  is  not  something 
possible  for  men  while  He  still  lived  on  earth  ;  rather  it 
forms  a  substitute,  in  the  future,  for  His  visible  presence 
in  their  midst.  Hence  its  prominence  in  Christ's  parting 
words.  "  Because  I  live,"  is  His  promise,  "  ye  shall  live 
also."     The  presence  of  Christ  in  the  believer  is  a  super- 

^  Cf.  Titius,  Die  neutest.  Lehre  von  der  Seliglceit,  iii.  68  f.  It  does  not 
follow  that  the  historic  Jesus  could  not  have  spoken  of  life-union  with  His 
followers,  as  of  something  to  be  realised  in  tlie  future.  There  is  a  very  fair 
Sj'uoptic  parallel  in  Mt  18-*',  the  authenticity  of  which  we  need  not  doubt. 


THE   JOHANNINR    MYSTICISM  111 

natural  iudwolling,  by  which  they  partake  in  His  spiritual 
life.  In  17^^  and  elsewhere  this  indwelling  is  explained 
or  illustrated  by  the  analogy  of  God's  indwelling  presence 
in  Christ ;  and  as  the  relation  of  God  to  Christ,  notwith- 
standing this  mutual  interpenetration  of  life,  is  wholly 
personal  in  character,  the  communion  of  Christ  with 
men  is  also  personal ;  it  is  a  relation  of  spirit  to  spirit. 
And  as  Christ  dwells  in  the  believer,  so  the  believer 
dwells  in  Christ,  is  incorporated  or  transplanted  into  the 
sphere  of  His  supernatural  life.  This  also  is  paralleled 
by  the  abiding  of  Christ  in  God.  "  In  that  day  ye  shall 
know  that  I  am  in  My  Father,  and  ye  in  Me,  and  I  in 
you"(1420). 

It  has  however  been  contended  that  in  the  Fourth 
Gospel  this  living  and  spiritual  conception  is  infected  with 
a  quite  unethical  and  realistic  strain  of  thought,  according 
to  which  Christ  conveys  to  men  a  higher  and  all  but 
physical  essence  whereby  they  partake  in  the  life  of  God. 
The  union,  it  is  true,  is  regarded  as  supernatural ;  but 
this  in  no  way  precludes  an  interpretation  on  ethical  and 
psychological  lines.  For  the  vehicle  of  Christ's  self-im- 
partation  is  His  word ;  His  word  is  as  it  were  the  medium 
or  element  of  the  reciprocal  possession,  as  it  is  put  in 
1 5^  "  if  ye  abide  in  Me,  and  My  words  abide  in  you." 
And  with  this  it  is  in  harmony  that  abiding  in  Christ 
is  represented  as  being  mediated  and  sustained,  on  the 
believer's  side,  by  faith  (5^^),  obedience  (14^^-^^),  smd  love 
(16^'^).  St.  John  has  occasionally  been  unfavourably  com- 
pared with  St.  Paul  in  this  matter,  and  accused  of  having 
introduced  at  a  crucial  point  factors  of  thought  which 
are  less  than  spiritual,  and  which  prepared  the  way  for 
later  ecclesiastical  dogma.  It  is  not  necessary  to  reply 
to  this  by  urging  that  St.  Paul  is  the  real  offender ;  since 
for  any  such  counter-charge  there  is  no  proper  ground. 
But  at  least  we  may  point  out  that  the  Johannine  view 
lays  a  deeper  emphasis  even  than  the  Pauline  on  the  psycho- 
logical mediation  of  life-union  as  a  present  experience, 
and  that    the    union    itself    is    everywhere    defined    as  a 


112  THE    PERSON    OF    JESUS    CHRIST 

Spiritual  relationship  of  person  to  person.  The  mutual 
immanence,  if  we  may  call  it  so,  is  the  intelligible  resultant 
of  Divine  grace  and  human  faith.  The  roots  of  this 
Johannine  conception  may  be  traced  partly  no  doubt  to 
the  doctrine  of  St.  Paul,  but  in  addition  the  direct  influence 
of  Jesus'  teaching  is  apparent. 

From  this  central  and  characteristic  thought  we  are 
irresistibly  led  to  one  view  of  Christ's  person  rather  than 
another.  If  He  is  thus  one  with  men,  and  they  with  Him, 
it  is  impossible  to  confine  His  life  within  the  dimensions 
of  normal  manhood.  But  the  Fourth  evangelist  does  not 
leave  us  to  mere  inference.  Over  and  over  again  he 
represents  union  with  Christ  as  being,  in  itself,  vital 
union  with  God.  The  analogy  of  Christ's  oneness  with 
the  Father  is  made  explicit :  "  That  they  may  all  be  one  ; 
even  as  Thou,  Father,  art  in  Me,  and  I  in  Thee,  that  they 
also  may  be  one  in  us"  (17-^).  This  is  a  conception  of 
which  still  more  is  heard  in  the  First  Epistle  of  John.  In 
the  Gospel  the  same  practical  identity  of  Christ  and  God 
is  signalised  in  those  passages  which  deal  with  the  mission 
and  activities  of  the  Spirit.  Not  merely  is  Christ  present 
in  the  community  by  the  Spirit ;  He  is  Himself  the 
object  of  the  Spirit's  witness.  He  is  indeed  the  Giver  of 
the  Spirit  to  His  people.  But  the  same  predications  are 
made  of  God.  He  too  is  to  send  the  Spirit  and  come  in 
the  Spirit  along  with  Christ.  Thus  from  a  fresh  point  of 
view  the  religious  equivalence  of  Christ  and  God  is 
revealed  as  the  truth  from  which  radiates  the  whole 
teaching  of  the  Gospel. 

The  Christology  of  St.  John,  then,  may  be  condensed 
in  the  truth  that  the  Father  is  personally  in  the  Son,  the 
Son  in  the  Father  (10^^  14^°).  The  most  august  and 
profound  words  of  our  Lord  are  simple  affirmations  of 
this  fact:  "I  and  the  Father  are  one"(103^  cf.  IT^^); 
"He  that  hath  seen  Me  hath  seen  the  Father"  (14^ 
cf.  12*^).  These  utterances  and  others  like  them  carry 
our  minds  in  the  direction  of  a  simple  modalism — Jesus 


SIMPLE    MODALISM  113 

Christ  is  God  revealed  to  faith — but  no  theory  of  the 
fact,  or  of  its  remoter  implications,  is  anywhere  sketched 
out  in  the  manner  of  a  theological  speculation.  We  are 
shown  that  the  word  of  Jesus  is  the  word  of  God  Himself, 
and  conveys  a  Divine  life  to  the  soul  ;  that  the  Father, 
exhibited  to  faith  in  a  historic  career,  is  now  fully  known 
in  His  Fatherhood.  Faith  is  certain  of  this,  and  affirms 
it  unconditionally.  It  is  another  question  how  far  we  can 
penetrate  to  the  ontological  grounds  of  this  modalism 
and  give  a  speculative  or  independent  account  of  them 
which  will  gain  the  interest  and  assent  of  the  philosopher. 
Even  the  Logos-conception,  which  St.  John  has  employed 
— whether  as  an  implied  solution  of  the  problem  or  as  a 
statement  of  it  in  final  terms — is  incompetent  to  give  us 
a  complete  understanding  of  all  mysteries  in  this  tran- 
scendent realm.  No  theory  expressible  in  words,  no  com- 
bination of  ideas,  even  those  of  an  apostle,  can  after  all 
avail  to  place  us  at  a  point  where  we  see  the  life  of  God- 
head on  its  inward  side.  Nevertheless,  we  know  and  are 
sure  that  in  Jesus'  person  the  God  of  heaven  and  earth 
has  appeared  among  us ;  that  the  Son  reveals  the  Father 
perfectly  as  being  one  with  Him  who  is  revealed ;  and 
that  our  eyes  are  enlightened  by  Him  in  all  knowledge 
because  He  dwells  within  as  our  inmost  life.  This  is  the 
keynote  of  the  Johannine  interpretation.  The  faith  out 
of  which  it  comes,  and  which  it  strives  to  evoke  in  other 
minds,  is  the  great  faith  that  Christ  and  God  are  one — 
the  Son  sharing  the  supernatural  life  of  the  Father,  the 
Father  completely  manifested  in  the  Son. 

This  unity  has  often  been  described  as  if  in  the  last 
resort  it  were  limited  and  defective,  a  unity  merely  of 
will  and  purpose.  And  the  objection  is  no  doubt  well 
taken,  provided  we  agree  that  will  is  something  less  and 
lower  than  ultimate  reality.  If  behind  all  will  and 
thought  there  exists  in  God  a  mysterious  incognizable 
substance,  not  to  be  described  in  terms  familiar  to  human 
experience,  but  representing  the  point  through  which  the 
threads  of  cosmic  relations  pass,  and  constituting  the 
8 


114  THE    PERSON    OF   JESUS    CHRIST 

inmost  essence  of  the  Divine  life,  then  indeed  the  oneness 
of  Christ  with  God  is  after  all  only  relative.  But  the 
supposition  is  mistaken.  There  is  in  the  universe  nothing 
more  real  than  will,  the  living  energy  of  spirit ;  nothing 
more  concrete  and  actual,  whether  it  be  in  God  or  man. 
It  is  the  last  home  and  sanctuary  of  essential  being.  We 
may  therefore  conclude  that  the  true  and  inherent  Godhead 
of  Jesus  Christ,  if  human  words  can  affirm  it,  is  affirmed 
unequivocally  in  the  Gospel  of  St.  John.  He  is  completely 
possessed  of  those  qualities  which  constitute  the  proper 
life  of  Deity. 

Yet  even  here  we  encounter  that  unfailing  counter- 
strain  of  subordination  which  we  have  seen  to  be  present 
in  the  New  Testament  as  a  whole.  It  is  noteworthy, 
indeed,  that  Jesus  affirms  His  personal  dependence  on  God 
precisely  in  those  passages  which  deal  with  His  uniqueness. 
Both  ideas  are  prominent,  for  instance,  in  5^^"-^.  So  too 
in  17  the  pre-existent  glory,  which  Jesus  entreats  may 
be  restored,  is  a  gift  bestowed  by  the  Father.  It  is 
misleading  to  say  that  this  suljordination  has  reference 
solely  to  the  life  on  earth.  It  is  of  course  manifest 
during  the  earthly  life  in  a  special  degree ;  Jesus  declares 
that  He  can  do  nothing  of  Himself,^  that  His  works,  like 
His  knowledge  or  His  right  to  judge,  have  been  given 
Him  of  the  Father.  But  we  introduce  the  distinctions  of 
a  later  age  when  we  argue  that  such  expressions  of  de- 
pendence are  only  meant  to  cover  Christ's  human  nature, 
or  His  incarnate  life,  or  what  theology  designates  "  the 
estate  of  humiliation."  For  the  subordination  is  quite 
distinctly  predicated  of  the  filial  life  as  such ;  it  character- 
ises Sonship  everywhere,  always.  Even  in  regard  to  His 
exalted  life  Jesus  could  say,  "  I  will  pray  the  Father  for 
you"  (16^^),  thus  projecting  the  idea  of  subordination 
to  the  other  side  of  death ;  and  as  a  parallel  to  this, 
relating  to  His  pre-existence,  we  cannot  ignore  the  state- 
ment (10^^)  that  the  Father  sanctified  Him  and  sent  Him 

1  A  trait  which  forbids  us  to  speak  of  the  Johannine  Christ  as  "omni- 
potent." 


PROLOGUE  TO  THE  GOSPEL  115 

into  the  world.  His  advent  implied,  of  course,  that  the 
dependent  nature  of  the  Son  hecunie  manifest  under  the 
new  conditions  which  pertain  to  a  true  human  life ;  ^  but 
St.  John  suggests  that  it  was  because  His  eternal  relation 
to  the  Father  had  been  one  of  filial  reliance  that  He  could 
thus  reveal  Him  perfectly  on  earth.  It  is  erroneous, 
therefore,  to  play  off  assertions  of  His  Godhead  and  of 
His  subordination  against  each  other,  as  if  either  weakened 
the  force  of  its  opposite,  or  reduced  it  to  a  merely  symbolic 
sense.  The  evangelist  is  equally  in  earnest  with  both 
things.  For  his  mind  both  sayings  are  essential  to  the 
complete  truth :  "  I  and  the  Father  are  one,"  and  "  The 
Father  is  greater  than  I."  Sonshlp  is  inconceivable  without 
dependence.  In  the  words  of  Liitgert :  "  The  superiority  of 
God  to  Jesus  does  not  mean  that  He  reserves  anything 
to  Himself ;  on  the  contrary.  He  wholly  conveys  Himself 
to  Jesus,  making  Him  sovereign  of  the  entire  world. 
What  it  does  mean  is  that  God  is  everywhere  and  at  each 
point  the  Origin,  the  Giver,  the  Foundation  ;  while  Jesus 
is  the  obedient  and  receptive  organ  of  His  will."  ^ 

We  turn  now  to  the  special  teaching  of  the  prologue 
(1^"^^).  It  was  convenient  to  defer  the  Christology  of 
these  introductory  verses  until  the  general  thought  of  the 
Gospel  had  been  examined,  for  after  all  the  subject  of 
the  Gospel  is  not  the  Logos  or  Word,  but  the  Divine 
person  Jesus  Christ.  But  with  this  general  exposition 
in   our  minds,  it  is    all  but    impossible  to   maintain   that 

1  It  has  been  maintained  that  the  idea  of  humiliation  is  virtually  foreign 
to  the  Johannine  thought,  in  which  the  conception  of  revelation  has  taken 
the  place  which  the  sacrifice  of  the  cross  occuided  for  St.  Paul.  Piquant 
contrasts  of  this  sort  have  a  very  real  didactic  value,  but  they  must  not 
be  overpressed.  There  is  sacrifice  for  St.  John  in  the  incarnation  as  well  as 
in  the  cross  (1'-''),  but  also  in  the  intervening  life.  "Though  the  greatest 
stress,"  Mr.  Purchas  rightly  observes,  is  "laid  throughout  the  Gospel  upon 
the  Son's  transcendent  dignity,  the  aspect  under  which  that  dignity  is 
invariably  contemplated  is  not  that  of  dignity  gloriously  won,  or  dignity 
brilliantly  maintained,  but  of  dignity  humbly  put  aside,  and  only  mani- 
fested in  pre-eminence  of  self-sacrifice  "  {Johannine  Problems,  104). 

^  Diejohann.  Chridoloyie,  34. 


116  THE    PERSON    OF   JESUS    CHRIST 

the  prologue  serves  a  speculative  and  not  a  practically- 
religious  purpose.  The  first  paragraph,  as  Harnack  puts 
it/  is  a  mere  preface,  not  a  philosophic  programme.  Its 
special  ideas  are  not  allowed  to  intrude  upon  the  record, 
nor  does  Jesus  ever  name  Himself  "  the  Word."  ^  The 
prologue  on  the  whole  makes  the  impression  of  having 
been  written  last,  in  a  current  vocabulary  and  mode  of 
thought  fitted  to  make  appeal  to  a  quite  specific  con- 
stituency. "  The  writer  desires  to  avail  himself  of  a 
conception  more  congenial  to  the  thought  of  his  readers 
than  to  his  own,  in  order  to  set  forth  in  words  familiar 
to  his  readers  the  doctrine  he  wishes  to  teach,  viz.  the 
uniqueness,  finality,  and  all-sufficiency  of  the  revelation 
of  God  made  in  the  person  of  Jesus  Christ."  ^  It  is  no 
a  "priori  philosopheme,  by  assimilating  wliich  the  mind 
was  to  be  prepared  to  understand  and  estimate  the  facts 
about  to  be  narrated. 

To  say  that  St.  John  derived  the  Logos-conception 
from  Philo  (who  may  have  had  it  from  the  Stoics  or  even 
Heraclitus)  is  one  of  those  tantalisingly  ambiguous  pro- 
nouncements which  darken  a  subject  almost  as  much  as 
they  enlighten.^  We  cannot  indeed  hold  that  there  is  no 
mutual  relation.  But  the  influence  of  Philo  appears  to  have 
acted  in  a  twofold  direction.  First,  by  way  of  antagonism. 
The  evangelist  uses  Philo's  term  to  deny  Philo's  thought. 
In  the  Fourth  Gospel  "  Logos "  means  word,  not  rational 
cosmic  order ;  uttered  revealing  speech,  not  immanent 
reason ;  an  agency  or  force  dynamic  or  personal  in  nature, 
not  static  or  vaguely  ideal.  There  is  nothing  answering 
to  this  in  Philo.  It  is  not  merely  that  in  the  earlier 
writer  the  Logos  is  probably  impersonal ;  it  is  also  carefully 
separated  from  God ;  as  in  various  Gnostic  schools,  it  is 
inserted    between    God    and    the  world    to    prevent  their 

1  ZTK.  ii.  189-231.  "  As  He  does  in  the  Evang.  Infantiae,  c.  1. 

^  Burton,  Short  Introduction  to  the  Gospels,  132. 

*  Cf.  Harnack's  trenchant  paragraph,  Doymcngcsch.*  i.  109.  Can  we 
assume  "  that  every  presentation  of  the  doctrine  of  the  Logos  had  passed 
through  the  moulding  hands  of  Philo  "  ? 


THE    LOGOS-COXCEPTION  117 

contact,  even  thdugli  in  a  pliilosophical  point  of  view  it 
may  serve  as  interniediary  ;  and  to  crown  all,  the  nature 
of  the  Logos  is  sucli  as  to  make  wholly  inconceivable  its 
entrance,  by  incarnation,  upon  the  real  processes  of  history. 
But  in  St.  John  the  Word  is  ])crsonal,  is  Himself  Divine, 
mediates  in  tlie  ci-eatiou  of  the  World,  and  enters  human 
life  by  becoming  tiesh  in  order  that  as  Jesus  Christ,  the 
historic  Messiah,  He  may  live  and  die  as  man  and  reveal 
the  very  heart  of  God.  Thus  even  were  the  evangelist's 
debt  to  Philo  an  ascertained  fact,  we  should  still  have  to 
acknowledge  that  the  borrowed  notion  was  submitted  to 
changes  so  radical  as  virtually  to  transform  it  into  its 
opposite. 

In  the  second  place,  Philo's  influence,  or  at  least  the 
influence  of  a  general  philosophical  atmosphere  typified 
by  Philo,  may  well  have  decided  which  of  the  terms 
furnished  by  the  Old  Testament  the  evangelist  should 
select  for  his  purpose.  Several  such  terms  were  open 
to  him — Wisdom,  the  Spirit,  the  Angel  of  the  Lord,  the 
Word.  In  any  case,  too  little  allowance  has  been  made 
for  Old  Testament  associations.  The  action  of  the  word 
of  God  in  Gn  1  may  well  have  supplied  the  first  sugges- 
tion of  the  Logos,  and  at  various  other  points  in  tlie 
older  Scriptures  the  creation  and  government  of  the  world, 
as  well  as  the  progress  of  revelation,  are  traced  to  the 
Divine  word  going  forth  from  God  as  the  active  organ 
of  His  will.i 

We  hold  then  that  what  St.  John  required  and  sought 
for  was  a  term  worthy  to  express  the  absolute  nature 
of  Christ,  in  whom  the  eternal,  self-revealing  God  was 
incarnate  ;  and  that  this  seemed  to  be  furnished  by  the  cou- 
temporary  religious  thought,  in  which  the  Logos-conception 
had  become  familiarly  established.  He  perceived  its  extra- 
ordinary value  for  the  expositor.  More  significantly  than 
any  otlier  word  it  gave  expression  to  that  aspect  of  Christ's 
life  and  work  which  he  regarded  as  supreme.  In  addition 
to  its  place  in  Old  Testament    thought,  it   had   received 

1  Ps  33«  10720  147'^  Is  55",  Jcr  23-9. 


118  THE    PERSON    OF   JESUS    CHRIST 

from  Hellenism  a  certain  cosmic  width  of  meaning,  and 
thus  furnished  a  point  of  contact — this  every  missionary 
must  appreciate — between  Christianity  and  current  modes 
of  religious  speculation.  He  chose  it  therefore  as  peculiarly 
fitted  to  recommend  the  Light  and  Life  which  had  appeared 
in  Jesus  ;  but  in  choosing  it  he  took  full  precautions  to 
ensure  by  his  exposition  that  its  Christian  import  should 
not  be  overshadowed  by  former  associations.  The  Word 
is  interpreted  by  Jesus,  not  Jesus  by  the  Word.  So  far 
from  being  captured  for  speculation,  the  Logos  receives 
a  connotation  which  is  fundamentally  ethical,  personal, 
soteriological.^  Its  colour  and  significance  are  drawn 
from  what  the  writer  has  known  of  Jesus,  Son  of  God  and 
Son  of  man ;  it  is  handled  with  perfect  freedom  and 
without  any  suspicion  of  bondage  to  a  phrase.  St.  John 
was  too  near  Christ  to  adopt  a  really  Greek  view.  In  the 
prologue  he  but  sums  up  the  total  impression  left  upon 
him  by  the  personality  of  the  Saviour.  If  we  recall 
the  allied  doctrine  of  Hebrews,  and  the  teaching  of  St. 
Paul  that  all  things  were  created  by  Christ  and  for  Him 
(Col  1^^),  it  will  seem  very  natural  that  St.  John  should 
advance  to  the  explicit  identification  of  the  historic  Jesus 
with  the  creative  Word. 

A  glance  at  the  details  of  the  prologue  may  illustrate 
these  results.  In  v.^  three  weighty  predications  are 
made  of  the  Logos :  {a)  He  was  from  the  beginning,  or 
eternally;  (h)  He  existed  in  a  living  personal  relation- 
ship with  God ;  (c)  His  place  was  within  the  Godhead. 
It  is  next  affirmed  that  He  was  the  medium  or  instrument 
of  creation.  Stress  is  laid  on  the  truth  of  His  universal 
relation  to  humanity ;  not  only  was  the  life  in  Him 
the  light  of  men  (v.*),  but  it  gives  light  to  every  man ' 
coming  into  the  world  (v.^).  His  Divine  life  had  been 
immanent  in  the  world  from  the  first,  though  unrecog- 
nised ;  but  now  He  came  in  person,  and  to  all  who 
received  Him  He  gave  the  right  to  become  children  of  God. 
The  commentators  point  out  how  v.^*  resumes  and  care- 

^  This  is  well  put  by  Schlatter,  Die  Lehre  der  Apostel,  131-32. 


THE  logos-concp:ption  119 

fwlly  corresponds  to  the  first  verse  of  the  Gospel.  The 
"Word  is  tliroughout  the  suhject  of  discourse,  though  not 
named  exphcitly  in  the  interval ;  but  now  in  v.^*  the 
announcement  of  the  Incarnation  is  laid  point  for  point 
alongside  of  the  initial  statement  regaiding  the  absolute 
eternal  nature  of  the  Word.  Westcott  has  drawn  out  the 
exact  harmony.  "  '  lie  was  God  '  and  '  He  became  flesh  ' : 
eternity  and  time,  the  Divine  and  human  are  reconciled 
in  Him.  '  He  was  with  God '  and  '  He  tabernacled 
among  us ' :  the  Divine  existence  is  brought  into  a  vital 
and  historical  connection  with  human  life.  '  He  was  in 
the  beginning '  and  '  we  beheld  His  glory ' :  He  who 
'  was '  beyond  time  was  revealed  for  a  space  to  the 
observation  of  men."  ^  By  the  phrase  of  deep  simplicity, 
"  the  "Word  became  flesh,"  it  appears  to  be  taught  that  He 
passed  into  a  new  form  of  existence,  a  form  essentially 
qualified  by  human  mortality  and  dependence.  Coming 
forth  from  God,  He  took  individuality  as  a  man,  in 
unbroken  personal  continuity  with  that  which  He  was 
before. 

We  may  distinguish  four  stages  in  the  thought  thus 
briefly  summarised.  There  is  (1)  the  Word  in  His 
primeval  everlasting  being ;  (2)  the  Lord  who  comes  to 
His  own  as  Life  and  Light  ;2  (3)  Jesus  Christ,  upon  wlioni 
the  writer's  mind  has  been  fixed  from  the  very  outset, 
and  who  is  now  further  characterised  (4)  as  the  only- 
begotten  Son.  Minor  details,  such  as  the  mention  of  the 
Forerunner  (v.^),  or  the  significant  phrase, "  them  that  believe 
on  His  name  "  (v.^^),  prove  the  evangelist's  mind  to  be  in 
vitalising  contact  with  religious  experience  from  first  to 
last.  The  entire  representation  is  as  it  were  an  avenue 
conducting  the  mind  to  a  redeeming  view  of  Jesus  as  an 
historic  person,  and  the  term  "  Logos,"  by  which  the  subject 

*  Commentary,  in  loc, 

^  Certain  scliolars  hold  that  in  the  recently  discovered  Odes  of  Solomon 
there  is  revealed  a  tendency  in  Jewish  thouf:;lit  wliich  has  close  affinity  with 
the  Johannine  conceptions  of  life,  light,  truth,  etc.  (cf.  Kendel  Harris,  'I'he 
Odes  attd  Psalms  of  Solomon-,  p.  xiii  tf.). 


120  THE    PERSON    OF   JESUS    CHRIST 

is  introduced,  is  never  more  than  a  subordinate  element 
in  a  special  vocabulary,  which  presents  the  personality  of 
Christ  in  a  certain  aspect  and  with  a  special  aim. 

It  is  obvious  that  nothing  in  the  prologue  is  intended 
to  shed  light  upon  the  mode  of  the  Incarnation,  however 
distinctly  it  may  assert  the  fact.  Yet  when  it  is  read,  as 
it  ought  to  be,  with  constant  reference  to  the  Gospel  it 
has  introduced,  no  one  can  miss  the  clear  indication  of 
the  motive  which  is  conceived  of  as  underlying  the  advent 
of  Jesus  Christ.  It  is  the  Divine  desire  to  impart  life  to 
a  perishing  and  darkened  world.  No  doubt  it  is  charac- 
teristic of  St.  John,  in  contrast  to  the  Pauline  view,  to 
regard  the  earthly  life  of  Jesus  less  as  a  humihation  than 
as  a  revelation  of  Divine  glory,  the  beams  of  which 
shine  forth  clearly  in  His  wondrous  works.  Nevertheless, 
he  is  wholly  at  one  with  St.  Paul  in  the  conviction  that 
the  redeeming  work  of  Christ  centres  in  the  sacrifice  of 
the  cross  (1^^).  Jesus  speaks  of  His  death  as  the.  hour 
of  His  being  glorified  (12^^-2*  13^^),  and  declares  that  He 
came  into  the  world  to  die  (12^'^).  But  death  for  Jesus 
is  part  of  His  life  as  Son.  And  life  and  death  together 
make  up  the  perfect  revelation.  The  whole  is  viewed 
in  the  light  of  eternal  fact,  the  lines  of  change  or 
temporal  distinction  being  obliterated.  All  that  St.  Paul 
beholds  in  the  exalted  Christ  is  found  by  St,  John,  the 
personal  disciple,  in  the  veiled  glory  of  the  earthly  Life. 
Thus  in  the  transcendent  consciousness  of  eternal  life  as 
an  experience  generated  by  the  knowledge  of  the  Son, 
eschatology  passes  into  the  background. 

The  Christology  of  the  First  Epistle  of  St.  John  is  in 
harmony  with  the  teaching  of  the  Gospel.  The  first  three 
verses  form  an  implicit  commentary  on  the  prologue  with 
which  the  Gospel  opens,  and  as  such  they  caution  us  once 
more  against  a  too  theoretic  interpretation  of  the  Logos- 
conception.  So  complete  is  the  identification  of  God  and 
Christ  that  in  a  series  of  passages  it  is  impossible  to  be  certain 
of  which  the  writer  speaks.      This  is  tlie  case,  for  instance, 


FIRST    EPISTLE    OF    JOHN  121 

in  the  great  closing  verse :  "  We  kuovv  that  the  Son  of 
God  is  come,  and  hath  given  us  an  understanding  that  we 
know  Ilini  that  is  true,  and  we  aie  in  Him  that  is  true, 
even  in  His  Son,  Jesus  Christ.  Tit  is  is  the  true  God,  and 
eternal  life "  (5-^).  What  is  specially  distinctive  of  the 
Epistle,  however,  is  the  emphatic  condemnation  of  certain 
active  champions  of  heresy.  In  the  spirit  of  docetic  idealism 
they  had  hegun  very  early  to  disunite  the  saving  word  of 
life  from  the  historic  Jesus,  and  to  seek  another  path  to 
fellowship  with  God  than  the  mediation  of  the  incarnate 
Christ.  It  is  possible  that  they  were  enthusiastic  students 
of  the  Alexandrian  philosophy  animated  by  the  desire  to 
impose  the  Philonic  Logos-conception  upon  the  Christian 
facts,  but  in  the  process  dissipating  their  significance  and 
value.  Of  these  men  St.  John  writes  in  tones  of  the 
gravest  indignation.  To  deny  that  Jesus  Christ  is  come 
in  the  flesh  (42-  ^),  or  that  He  underwent  actual  death 
(1'^  5^),  is  to  abandon  the  faith  for  anti-Christian  lies.  To 
refute  an  error  so  far-reaching  the  writer  falls  back  on  per- 
sonal testimony,  declaring  in  the  first  verse  of  the  Epistle 
that  he  is  proclaiming  "  that  which  we  have  heard,  that 
which  we  have  seen  with  our  eyes,  that  which  we  beheld, 
and  our  hands  handled."  The  presence  of  Life  among 
men  had  been  audible,  visible,  tangible.  Christ's  advent 
in  the  flesh  is  that  on  which  hangs  everything  that  can 
be  called  salvation ;  victory  belongs  only  to  those  who 
receive  Him  as  the  Son  of  God.  "Whosoever  denieth 
the  Son,  the  same  hath  not  the  Father :  he  that  confesseth 
the  Son  hath  the  Father  also  '  (2^^). 


BOOK   II. 

HISTORY  OF  CHRIS TOLOGICAL 
DOCTRINE. 

CHAPTER   I. 

CHRISTOLOGY  IN  THE  SUB-APOSTOLIC  AGE. 

§  1.  Introduction. — In  the  Neutestamentliche  Theologie  of 
Holtzmann  we  fiud  an  interesting  passage/  in  which  the 
writer  expresses  the  conviction  that  even  in  St.  Paul  and 
St.  John  there  He  the  seeds  and  origins  of  the  later  Christo- 
logical  development.  This  at  least  indicates  that  our 
study  of  the  doctrine  in  history  ought  to  start  from  the 
teaching,  not  of  Jesus  Himself,  but  of  the  apostles.      It 

Literature — On  the  history  of  Chi-istological  doctrine  as  a  whole  : 
Harnack,  Lehrbuch  der  Dogmengcschichte*,  1909  (Eng.  tr.  1894)  ;  Loofs,  Leit- 
faden  zum  Studmm  der  Dogmcngeschichte*,  1906  ;  Seeberg,  Lehrhuch  der 
Dogmengeschichte'^,  1908  ff.  ;  Baur,  Die  christliche  Lehre  von  der  Drei- 
einigkeit  und  Menschwerdung,  1841-43  ;  Doriier,  Entwicklungsgtschichte  der 
Lehre  van  der  Person  ChrisH%  1845-53  (Eng.  tr.  1861-63)  ;  Ottley,  The 
Doctrine  of  the  Incarnation,  1896  ;  Bethune-Baker,  History  of  Early 
Christian  Doctrine,  1903 ;  Kriiger,  Das  Dogma  von  der  Dreieinigkeit 
und  Gottmenschheit,  1905 ;  Bonwetsch,  Grundriss  der  Dogmengeschichte, 
1909. 

On  the  present  chapter:  Loofs,  article  "  Cliristologie,  Kirchenlehre," 
in  RE."  iv.  (to  which  I  owe  much)  ;  Engelhardt,  Das  Christenium  Justins^ 
1878  ;  Lightfoot,  St.  Clement  of  Rome,  1890,  and  St.  Ignatius,  1889  ;  Zahn, 
IgnoMus  von  Antiochien,  1873  ;  von  der  Goltz,  Ignatius  von  Antiochien  als 
Christ  und  Theologe,  1894  ;  Rainy,  The  Ancient  Catholic  Church,  1902  ; 
Kriiger,  article  "  Gnosis,"  in  RE.^  vi.  ;  Swete,  The  Apostles'  Creed,  1894; 
McGitl'ert,  The  Apostles'  Creed,  1902  ;  Kattenbusch,  Das  apostolische  Symbol, 
1894-1900  ;  Hatch,  Hibbert  Lectures,  1888. 

1  i.  418,  cf.  353. 

122 


THE    EARLIEST   CHRISTOLOGY  123 

was  from  their  preacliing  thai  the  earliest  circles  of 
believers  received  a  conception  of  the  Lord.  The  common 
faith  evoked  by  the  evangelism  of  apostolic  men  is  the 
seed-plot  of  ecclesiastical  Christology.  To  these  primitive 
Christian  societies  the  Gospel  of  the  Kingdom  came 
primarily  as  a  Gospel  of  Christ — i.e.  good  news  about 
God  resting  on  and  revolving  round  an  historic  person. 
This  person  had  revealed  God's  mind  toward  men ;  He 
had  wrought  salvation  by  His  death ;  as  Eisen  and 
Ascended  Lord  He  was  soon  to  return  in  glory,  and 
establish  the  Kingdom  in  its  fulness.  He  was  the  Messiah 
promised  from  of  old,  but  Messiah  in  a  sense  the  novelty 
of  which  was  slowly  dawning  on  the  Christian  mind. 

To  speak  of  an  "  official "  doctrine  of  Christ  in  New 
Testament  times  is,  however,  impossible.  His  Divine 
uniqueness  was  indeed  acknowledged  everywhere.  From 
the  first  it  was  felt  that  He  had  a  universal  and  eternal 
meaning,  stretching  over  history  and  reaching  back  to 
the  inmost  sphere  of  the  Divine.  All  believers  held  to 
Him  an  attitude  of  trust  and  worship.  Much  earlier 
than  the  days  told  of  in  Pliny's  famous  letter  they  sang 
hymns  to  Christ  "  as  though  to  God."  So  high  a  name 
was  but  the  expression  of  their  new  life  in  Him.  But 
we  are  not  in  a  position  to  say  exactly  how  the  average 
believer  thought  of  this  uniqueness.  Jesus  belonged  to, 
if  He  did  not  fill,  the  sphere  of  God — so  much  was  certain  ; 
but  men  did  not  question  themselves  more  particularly 
as  to  the  bearing  of  this  on  the  axiom  of  the  Divine  unity. 
They  were  content  to  have  life  through  His  name,  and 
to  leave  problems  of  theory  alone.  The  marks  of  a 
Christian  were,  thus  far,  more  practical  in  kind.  Probably 
the  creneral  belief  included  as  its  chief  items  faith  in  the 
one  God  revealed  in  Christ,  a  hope  in  the  life  everlasting 
guaranteed  by  the  historic  Messiah,  and  the  conviction 
that  after  baptism  one  ought  to  live  in  conformity  with 
the  example  of  Jesus. 

Do  we  know  of  any  primitive  circle,  evangelised  by 
apostolic  men,  which  held  a  purely  "  humanitarian  "  view 


124  THE    PERSON    OF    JESUS    CHRIST 

of  Christ  ?  Was  there  anywhere  a  group  of  believers 
who  considered  Him  to  be  only  an  eminent  religious 
teacher,  like  the  prophets,  though  greater  ?  There  appears 
to  have  been  one  such  group.  In  his  Dialogue  with 
Trypho  (cap.  48)  Justin  writes :  "  Some  there  are  of  your 
race,  who  allow  that  He  is  Christ,  but  declare  Him  to  be 
a  man  of  men ;  with  whom  I  do  not  agree."  The  same 
party  regarded  Him  as  the  son  of  Joseph  and  denied  His 
pre-existence.  But  it  is  noteworthy  that  even  so  these 
were  but  a  section  of  Jewish  Christianity.  They  formed 
part  of  the  Ebionite  sect,  and,  like  all  Ebionites,  held  that 
it  was  by  the  descent  of  the  Spirit  at  His  baptism  that 
Jesus  was  endowed  for  the  vocation  of  Messiah.  Certain 
scholars  have  argued  that  this  represents  the  genuinely 
original  Christology,  current  among  the  first  Christian  Jews 
of  Palestine.  But  the  facts  are  dead  against  them.  St. 
Paul's  teaching  as  to  the  Person  of  our  Lord  never  was, 
so  far  as  we  know,  the  subject  of  controversy ;  which  of 
itself  proves  that  the  apostles  took  the  higher  view  of 
Jesus'  nature.  Or,  to  take  another  example,  the  Christo- 
logical  heresy  against  which  St.  Paul  warns  the  Colossians 
contained  elements,  as  Lightfoot  has  shown,  of  a  Gnostic 
character.  Instances  of  this  kind  are  sufficient  evidence 
that  various  types  of  Christological  thought  prevailed  even 
among  Jewish  Christians  at  the  close  of  the  apostolic  age, 
and  the  effort  to  make  them  out  unanimously  humanitarian 
is  a  failure. 

Of  course,  some  colour  may  seem  to  be  given  to  the 
mistake  by  the  fact  that  all  types  of  tradition  in  the  first 
century  lay  stress  on  Jesus'  true  humanity.  From  the 
beginning  the  Christian  mind  assumed  that  Jesus  of 
Nazareth  was  man.  But  Loofs  points  to  two  considera- 
tions tending  to  show  that  in  primitive  Jewish -Christian 
circles  there  were  no  advocates  of  mere,  humanitarianism. 
In  the  first  place,  to  hold,  as  unquestionably  they  did 
hold,  that  Jesus  at  His  baptism  received  the  plenitude  of 
the  Spirit,  is  to  affirm  a  very  great,  an  absolutely  super- 
natural, thing.     It  is  to  assert  that  a  certain  individual, 


THE   SUB- APOSTOLIC    AGE  125 

at  a  particnlar  jioiut  of  liistory,  had  vouchsafed  to  Him 
the  Spirit  of  the  living  God  in  its  fulness.  Between  such 
a  view  and  tliat  of  St.  Paul  the  gulf  is  not  iniiiassable. 
Secondly,  this  idea  of  Jesus  as  a  Spirit-filled  man  is  not, 
in  the  strict  sense,  an  expression  of  their  religious  estimate 
of  Jesus;  it  is  a  theory  of  the  sul)ject,  though  an  incipient 
one ;  it  is  an  attempt  to  explain  the  uniqueness  which  that 
estimate  ascribes  to  Him.  Our  problem  therefore  is : 
What  was  the  prevailing  religious  estimate  of  Jesus  at 
the  close  of  the  apostolic  age  ? 

It  is  scarcely  enough  to  say  that  He  was  held  to  be 
the  Messiah,  That  is  of  course  true ;  but,  on  the  one 
hand,  "  Christ"  had  become  for  Gentile  believers  little  more 
than  Jesus'  surname,  while,  on  the  other,  for  Jewish 
Christians,  the  title  bore  rather  on  the  future  than  the 
present,  and  carried  men's  minds  into  the  world  of 
eschatology.  This  being  so,  we  shall  find  a  clearer 
instance  of  the  practical  religious  attitude  of  the  Church 
in  the  custom  of  'prayer  to  Jesus.  That  this  custom  pre- 
vailed in  the  sub-apostolic  Church  is  made  virtually 
certain  by  the  facts  to  which  we  can  point  at  either  limit 
of  the  period.^  Prayer  is  addressed  to  Christ  directly  in 
the  New  Testament  (Ac  T^  1  Co  1\  2  Co  12^,  Rev  22^''); 
and  according  to  the  principle  lex  supplicandi,  lex  credendi 
we  may  regard  this  as  the  practical  "  deifying "  of  Jesus 
which  anticipated  a  theoretical  Christology.  Again,  in 
113  we  have  Pliny's  letter  to  Trajan,  formerly  referred 
to,  in  which  he  reports  that  Christians  of  his  province 
were  accustomed  to  gather  before  sunrise  on  a  fixed  day 
of  the  week,  and  sing  alternately  "  a  hymn  to  Christ  as 
though  to  God."  In  the  age  of  the  Apologists  the  worship 
of  Jesus  was  viewed  by  the  heathen  as  a  mark  of  Christian 
faith,  and  in  the  immediately  following  generations  the 
practice  of  men  like  Irenanis  and  Tertullian  does  not  admit 
of  question.  Facts  like  these,  which  Loofs  enumerates, 
justify  his  temperately  expressed  conclusion  that  we  ought 
to  consider  the  invocation  of  Christ  "  as  an  inherited 
^  Zahn,  Slizzen  aus  dem  Leben.  dcr  ultcn  Kirche",  271  flf. 


126  THE    PERSON    OF    JESUS    CHEIST 

custom  prevailing  in  all,  or  at  least  all  non-Ebionitic, 
churches  of  the  post-apostolic  age."  "  This  custom,"  he 
adds,  "  shows  more  clearly  than  any  incipient  Christological 
speculation,  that  to  the  believers  of  the  time  from  which 
we  have  to  set  out  Christ  belonged  to  the  sphere  of  God. 
And  this  is  the  root  from  which  sprang  the  development 
of  the  Christological  dogma."  ^ 

How  far  this  religious  estimate  of  Christ  took  the 
shape  of  ascribing  to  Him  the  predicate  6e6<;  is  uncertain.^ 
One  gathers  generally  that  the  divinity  of  our  Lord,  for 
the  most  part  expressed  in  practical  terms,  was  a  recog- 
nised fact  among  Christians  in  the  second  century.  For 
the  Christian  mind  at  large  He  was  both  God  and  man, 
though  certain  Jewish-Christian  groups  may  have  scrupled 
to  use  the  decided  language  of  their  fellows.  Many,  how- 
ever, were  content  to  believe  in  "  one  God,  one  Lord," 
without  in  the  least  impairing  their  monotheism,  or  pushing 
reflection  beyond  the  stage  of  naive  faith. 

In  this  transition  period  of  the  sub  apostolic  age  there 
were,  according  to  Harnack,  two  main  streams  of  Christo- 
logical reflection.  "  Jesus,"  he  writes,  "  was  either  regarded 
as  the  man  whom  God  has  chosen,  in  whom  the  Godhead 
•  or  the  Spirit  of  God  has  dwelt,  and  who,  after  testing,  was 
adopted  by  God  and  invested  with  dominion  (Adoptian 
Christology) ;  or  He  ranked  as  a  heavenly  spiritual  being 
(or  the  highest  after  God),  who  took  flesh,  and  went  back 
to  heaven  again  after  completing  His  work  on  earth 
(pneumatic  Christology)."  ^  Hermas,  he  argues,  is  a  clear 
example  of  the  former  point  of  view,  which  was  later 
declared  heretical ;  Barnabas,  Clement,  Ignatius,  Polycarp 
illustrate  tlie  latter.  Harnack  himself  tends  more  recently 
to  modify  this  sharp  distinction.  Loofs,  indeed,  had  urged 
that  both  Christologies,  to  the  limited  extent  in  which 
they    are    correctly    formulated,    go    back    rather    to    the 

1  0]}.  cit.  22. 

^  Trats  0eov  was  a  common  title  ;  cf.  1  Clem.,  and  Didaclie,  c.  9  and  10. 
It  at  least  expressed  the  belief  that  His  connection  with  God  was  of  a  unique 
kind. 

^  See  History  of  Dogma  (Eng.  tr.),  i.  190  ff. 


THE    APOSTOLIC    FATHERS  127 

primitive    two-sided    estimate    of    Clirist  Kara  adpKa  and    ' 
Kara    Trvevfjia.      This   he   traces  to   lio    l^^-,  and  considers 
to   be   the   most   ancient   and  most  widely  spread  of  all    ' 
Christological  formulas.     It  meant  that  Christ  was   con- 
templated alternately  on  the  side  of  His  natural  and  His 
supernatural    being,   without   any    effort   to   determine    to 
which  the  personal  subject   in    Him  belonged.     There   is 
much  that  is  attractive  and  illuminating  in  this  suggestion, 
though   it  will  not  cover  all  the  facts.      But  in  spite  of 
the   rudimentary   character   of   early   Christological  ideas, 
they  rested  on  quite  definite  convictions.     Gospel  traditions  \ 
kept  men  aware  that  the  self-consciousness  of  the  historic   ' 
Jesus  had  been  more  than  human,  while  His  post-resurrec- 
tion appearances,  due  to  His  own  direct  agency,  supplied 
a  final  proof  of  His  supramundane  nature.      Ebionism  had 
little  influence  in  the  wider  life  of  the  Church.     No  one 
of   course  operated  with  ideas  like  the  modern  "person- 
ality " ;     but    it    was    never    doubted    that    the    "  Spirit " 
present  in  Jesus  was  essentially  Divine  and  pre-existent, 
nor  would  the  suggestion  that  Jesus  was  a  man  who  had 
become  God  have  been  understood  at  this   time.     He  was  I 
always   viewed   as   both    things — heavenly  Divine   Spirit, 
and  true  man  who  had  suffered  and  died.      In  prayers  and    . 
hymns  He  was  worshipped  along  with  God  the  Father. 

§  2.  The  Apostolic  Fathers. — We  shall  gain  a  clearer 
view  of  this  common  faith  by  examining  data  presented 
in  the  writings  of  the  so-called  Apostolic  Fathers,  from 
the  year  90  to  140.  Ignatius  apart,  we  find  that  the 
resl^xhibit  a  striking  variety  of  ideas.  All  start,  as  the 
New  Testament  does,  from  the  historic  Christ,  who  is 
identified  with  the  exalted  Lord.  He  is  the  perfect 
revelation  of  God,  His  servant,  His  beloved ;  or  again,  it 
is  said  that  God  "chose"  Him.  It  is  agreed  that  He 
existed  before  His  bu-th  in  a  state  of  glory  and  power, 
and  Clement  of  Rome  (about  95)  calls  Him  "the  sceptre 
of  the  majesty  of  God,"  and  declares  that  His  coming  to 
earth    was   a   willing    self-abasement  (c.    16).     From   the 


128  THE    PERSON    OF    JESUS    CHRIST 

beginning  He  was  Lord  of  all  things,  by  Him  the  world 
was  created,  God  took  counsel  with  Him  at  the  creation 
of  man.^  On  the  whole  His  eternal  prior  existence  was 
simply  assumed,  for  it  was  felt  that  One  to  whom  men 
appealed  in  prayer  could  not  be  the  creature  of  time.  Such 
ideas  of  pre-existence  must  not  be  confused  with  those 
current  in  Judaism. 

One  point  has  caused  difficulty.  When  we  read  in 
2  Clement  (c.  9):  "Christ  the  Lord  who  saved  us,  being 
first  spirit,  then  became  flesh,"  or  in  Rermas  (S.  5,  6) : 
"  The  holy  pre-existent  Spirit,  which  created  the  whole 
creation,  God  made  to  dwell  in  flesh  that  He  desired,"  are 
we  to  say  that  the  pre-existent  Christ  is  being  identified 
with  the  Holy  Spirit?  Baur,  Harnack,  Loofs^  and  others 
have  maintained  this,  but  in  his  last  edition  Seeberg  puts 
forward  strong  reasons  for  denying  it,  and  appositely  cites 
St.  Paul's  identification  of  the  Lord  with  the  Spirit  in 
2  Co  3^^  although  his  general  practice  of  differentiating 
them  is  quite  plain.^  But  in  any  case  we  are  entitled  to 
affirm  that  at  this  stage  the  dogmatic  distinction  had  not 
,  been  worked  out.  Christ  is  Spirit,  or  Holy  Spirit,  by 
1  His  very  essence ;  as  Spirit  He  is  one  with  God,  and  of 
the  same  nature.  It  is  even  said  that  His  suff'erings  were 
the  sufferings  of  God.*  Not  that  we  are  to  import  a 
Nicsean  significance  in  these  phrases.  Alongside  of  the 
unity  of  the  Son  with  God  goes  an  emphasis  upon  His 
subordination  that  would  scarcely  have  been  possible  two 
centuries  later.  This  was  due  to  inherited  ideas  about 
Jesus'  Divine  mission,  His  life  of  obedience  and  trust,  and 
His  return  to  the  Father.  Indeed  there  are  parts  of 
Hermas  where,  to  secure  definiteness  of  outline,  Christ  is 
represented  as  an  angel  or  lofty  spirit,  though  passages 
may  also  be  quoted  of  a  different  tenor. 

When  Jesus  is  called  Son  of  God,  in  literature  of  this 

^  Barnahas,  c.  5. 

^  Loofs  calls  this  Binitarian  Monotheism,  and  thinks  that  it  commended 
itself  by  falling  in  conveniently  with  the  Kara.  ffapKa-Kara.  irvtv/xa  formula. 
•*  Lehrbuch  d.  Dogmciigeschichlc^,  i.  98.  *  1  Clem.  c.  2. 


CHRIST    AND    THE    SPIRIT  129 

period,  the  name  "  is  connected  more  especially  with  the 
human  life  by  which  it  was  manifested."  ^  Hence  we  can- 
not assume,  as  we  might  later,  that  "  Son  "  'per  se  implies  a 
personal  relation  of  the  personal  factor  in  Christ  to  or  in 
the  Father.  But  although  speculation  was  not  yet  busied 
with  the  point,  incipient  tokens  of  it  are  traceable  in 
Hennas,  who  certainly  names  the  pre-existent  Christ  by 
the  title  Son  (S.  9'-).  How  close  the  relation  between  the 
Son  and  the  Father  was  conceived  to  be,  may  be  seen  from 
the  opening  words  of  2  demerit :  "  Brethren,  we  ought  so 
to  think  of  Jesus  Christ,  as  of  God,  as  of  the  Judge  of 
quick  and  dead."  It  was  possible,  in  short,  to  accentuate 
either  His  Divine  unity  with,  or  His  personal  distinction 
from,  the  Father. 

As  regards  the  entrance  of  Christ  into  human  life,  two 
streams  of  reflection  are  observable.  On  the  one  hand, 
the  pre-existent  Son  of  God,  it  is  taught,  joined  Himself 
to  the  man  Jesus,  making  him  thus  God's  Servant,  and  as 
Spirit  pervading  and  energising  all  the  workings  of  the 
flesh.  The  man  Jesus  is  but  as  it  were  the  form  and 
vehicle  of  the  (Christ)  Spirit — a  view,  obviously,  with  a 
certain  leaning  towards  dualism.  Traces  of  it  may  be 
found  in  Hermas  and  Barnabas.  The  other  line  of  reflection 
conceives  Christ  to  have  become  man,  exchanging  one  form 
of  being  for  another ;  and  this  may  be  illustrated  from 
2  Clement,  and  particularly  from  the  letters  of  Ignatius. 
It  permitted  men  to  predicate  now  Divine  and  now  human 
properties  of  the  one  Christ.  Certain  advocates  of  the 
former  view,  it  is  possible,  held  that  the  union  between  the 
Son  of  God  and  the  man  Jesus  took  place  at  His  baptism — 
an  idea  which  had  been  maintained  by  groups  of  Jewish 
Christians,  and  formed  part  of  the  philosophical  theory 
elaborated  by  Cerinthus  in  the  intei-ests  of  docetism  (Iren. 
1.  26).  But  for  this  period  it  would  be  a  mistake  to 
insist  on  this  distinction. 

§  3.   Ignatius.  —  When    we    turn    to    the    attractive 
""  ^  Swete,  The  Apostles'  Creed,  29. 

9 


130  THE    PERSON    OF    JESUS    CHRIST 

personality  of  Ignatius,  the  martyr  bisliop  of  Antioch,  it 
is  to  one  in  whose  thoughts  and  life  Jesus  Christ  formed 
the  inspiring  centre.  His  letters  (written  before  117) 
reveal  an  almost  apostolic  sense  of  Jesus'  person  as  a 
whole,  and  have  left  a  deep  mark  on  later  Christology. 
"  Nowhere  else,"  Dr,  Sanday  has  remarked,  "  have  we  the 
idea  of  the  fulness  of  Godhead  revealed  in  Christ  grasped 
and  expressed  with  so  much  vigour."  ^  His  ideas  are 
Johannine  in  the  main.  In  perfervid  language  he  sets 
forth  Christ,  again  and  again,  as  the  Eevealer  of  God  and 
the  Eternal  Head  of  a  race  of  redeemed  men.  "Jesus 
Christ,  our  inseparable  life,  is  the  mind  of  the  Father,"  ^ 
"  the  unerring  mouth  in  whom  the  Father  hath  spoken."  ' 
He  starts  from  the  historic  Christ,  now  exalted  and  im- 
passible, and  dwells  with  great  emphasis  on  the  reality  of 
His  earthly  career,  pointing  in  turn  to  His  birth,  baptism, 
sufferings,  death,  descent  into  Hades,  and  resurrection.* 
"  Ignatius,"  it  has  been  said,  "  is  the  great  teacher  of  the 
sacramental  significance  of  the  incidents  of  the  incarnate 
life,"^  and  just  for  this  reason  his  anti-docetism  is 
pronounced.  "  He  suffered  truly,"  he  writes  to  the 
Smyrnseans,  "  as  also  He  raised  Himself  truly ;  not  as 
certain  unbelievers  say,  that  He  suffered  in  semblance, 
being  themselves  mere  semblance."  ^  One  or  two  passages 
are  singularly  like  the  second  article  of  the  Apostles' 
Creed.  A  strong  and  keen  sense  of  history  comes  out. 
It  was  because  the  disciples  "  touched "  Christ  that  they 
were  able  to  despise  death.'^  Flesh,  in  the  view  of 
Ignatius,  belongs  to  Christ's  nature  permanently,  even  in 
heaven.  The  whole  value  of  Christianity  would  perish 
with  the  denial  that  He  came  into  a  genuinely  human  life. 
This  is  maintained  vehemently  against  all  who  professed 
to  give  a  purer  and  more  spiritual  theory.  Far  from 
concealing,  Ignatius    rather  glories  in  the  paradoxes  and 

1  Criticism  of  the  Fourth  Gospel,  244.  ^  Eph.  3.  ^  ^^m.  8. 

*  Cf.  Trail.  9,  where,  as  Lightfoot  says,  the  word  "truly"  is  repeated 
again  and  again  as  "a  watchword  against  docetism." 

•*  Ottley,  Doct.  of  the,  Incarnation,  vol.  i.  164.  *  2.  ''  Smyr.  3. 


CHRISTOLOGY    IN    IGNATIUS  131 

antitheses  of  Christ's  being ;  they  are  cardinal  to  the 
salvation  He  brings.  "  There  is  one  only  physician,"  he 
writes  in  a  classic  passage,  "  of  flesh  and  of  spirit,  generate 
and  ingenerate,  God  in  man,  true  life  in  death,  Son  of 
Mary  and  Son  of  God,  first  passible  and  then  impassible."  ^ 
Neither  aspect  can  be  dispensed  with ;  whatever  the  verbal 
tension,  the  idea  must  somehow  be  put  in  words  that  God 
has  appeared  in,  or  as,  man  ;  the  Eternal  in  time.  The 
union  of  these  two  sides,  in  a  vitally  indissociable  union, 
is  the  hall-mark  of  Ignatian  Christology. 

It  is  also  implied  that  the  relation  of  Jesus  Christ  to  the 
Father  is  of  a  unique  kind.  In  Him  have  been  manifested 
things  wrought  in  the  ancient  silence  of  God  and  perfected 
in  His  counsels.^  Christ  is  a  revelation  less  of  the  reason 
than  of  the  saving  will  of  the  Father ;  for  although 
Ignatius  employs  the  term  X070?,  it  is  scarcely  with  a 
technical  significance.  And  this  revelation  was  given,  not 
in  His  words  merely,  but  in  His  silent  deeds,  or,  to  be  more 
exact,  through  His  inmost  self  and  personality.  From 
this  point  of  view  a  glance  is  given  to  His  filial  subordina- 
tion :  "  the  Lord  did  nothing  without  the  Father,"  "  as 
Jesus  Christ  was  to  the  Father,  be  obedient  to  the  bishop 
and  to  one  another."  ^  Elsewhere  He  is  said  to  have  been 
an  imitator  of  the  Father,*  and  there  is  a  reference  to  His 
faith  and  love.^  But  the  writer  does  not  insist  on  this. 
The  fulness  of  Christ's  relation  to  God  is  everywhere 
expressed  by  the  term  "  Son."  For  Ignatius,  no  doubt,  as 
for  St.  John,  the  primary  reference  of  this  title  is  to  the 
historic  Lord,  now  crowned  with  glory.  In  virtue  of  His 
immaculate  birth  Christ  is  Son  of  Man  and  Son  of  God, 

^  Eph.  7.  The  Apostolic  Fathers,  as  Professor  Gwatkin  has  juit  it 
{Studies  in  Arianism,  6),  "  scarcely  seem  to  see  tlie  difficulty  of  reconciling 
divinity  with  suHering — for  this  rather  than  the  Resurrection  was  the 
stumbling-block  of  their  time.  'If  He  suffered,'  said  the  Ebionites,  'He 
was  not  Divine.'  'If  He  was  Divine,'  answered  the  Docetists,  'His 
sufferings  were  unreal.'  The  sub- Apostolic  Fathers  were  content  to  reply 
that  He  was  Divine  and  that  He  truly  suti'ered,  without  attempting  to 
explain  the  difficulty." 

^  Eph.  19.  ^  Mag.  7.  13,  •»  Phil.  7.  »  Eph.  20. 


132  THE    PERSON    OF   JESUS    CHRIST 

with  descent  through  Mary  from  David  and  through  the 
Holy  Spirit  from  God.  But  I  am  not  convinced  by  Zahn's 
careful  argument  that  the  name  "  Son  "  is  essentially  and 
exclusively  relative  to  the  miraculous  birth  in  the  flesh.^ 
If  we  take  such  phrases  as  "  Jesus  Christ,  who  was  with 
the  Father  before  the  worlds,"  ^  "  Jesus  Christ  His  Son, 
who  is  His  word  that  proceeded  from  silence,"  *  or,  still 
more  relevantly,  a  description  like  "  Jesus  Christ,  who 
came  forth  from  One  Father  and  is  with  One  and  departed 
unto  One " ;  *  if  we  consider  that  no  other  designation  is 
available  for  the  pre-existent  One,  since  "  Logos "  is  used 
quite  untechnically,  I  cannot  but  feel  that — since  Father- 
hood and  Sonship  are  essentially  correlative  for  him  as  for 
the  writers  of  the  New  Testament — Ignatius  also  carries 
"  Son  "  backward  into  the  eternal  sphere.  His  view  will 
then  be  that  "  the  Eternal  Son  of  God  became  man,  when 
God  created  for  Him  through  Mary  a  human  life,  namely 
the  life  of  the  historic  Son."^  But  however  this  may  be, 
it  is  agreed  that  Christ  is  presented  as  pre-existent  on  the 
Divine  or  "  pneumatic "  side  of  His  being.  Not  indeed 
that  Ignatius  knows  anything  of  the  later  doctrine  of 
eternal  generation,  for  he  uses  the  epithet  "  ingenerate " 
of  Christ  in  His  higher  being.^  But  the  Subject  of  the 
historic  life  had  been  as  God  before  He  "appeared  in 
the  likeness  of  man."  ^  We  also  find  in  Ignatius  the 
authentically  New  Testament  idea  that  it  was  after  the 
resurrection  that  the  Saviour's  nature  was  fully  manifested  : 
"  our  Lord  Jesus  Christ,"  he  writes,  "  being  in  the  Father, 
is  the  more  plainly  visible."  ^ 

In  what  sense  is  the  predicate  "  God "  applied  to 
Christ  in  these  letters  ?  For  it  is  frequently  so  applied 
in  moments  of  deep  feeling,  even  by  a  writer  whose 
monotheism  is  emphatic.  There  are  phrases  like  "  Jesus 
Christ,   our   God,"   "  the    blood    of    God,"  and   "  the    pas- 


^  Ignatius  von  Antiochien,  469. 

*  Mag.  6. 

8  Mag.  8. 

*  Mag.  7. 

^  Seelierg,  op.  cit.  i.  101. 

«  Uph.  7. 

'  Ibid.  19. 

8  £0771.  8. 

CHRISTOLOGY    IN    IGNATIUS  133 

sion  of  my  God."  ^  The  entire  content  of  Ignatius' 
thought  of  God  is  drawn  from  Clirist :  he  sees  the  two 
merged  in  one.  Moreover,  functions  and  honours  of  a 
specifically  Divine  character  are  ascribed  to  Christ,  such  as 
the  knowledge  of  our  secret  heart,  the  power  to  awaken 
penitence,  to  raise  up  prophets,  to  care  in  love  for  His 
Church.  His  relation  to  the  Christian  is  that  of  in- 
dwelling :  He  is  "  our  never-failing  life,"  union  with  whom, 
especially  in  the  Eucharist,  is  eo  ipso  union  with  the  Father. 
True,  Ignatius  makes  no  effort  to  construct  a  set  theory  of 
the  incarnate  person.  But  it  is  flying  in  the  face  of  the 
actual  data  to  say  that  for  him  "  God  "  in  this  relation  is 
"  only  a  pregnant  expression  of  the  fact  that  in  Christ  God 
is  grasped  and  held  as  eternal  salvation,^  if  by  this  is 
meant  that  he  speaks  of  the  Lord's  deity  merely  in  value- 
judgments.  The  simple  fact  is  that  for  Ignatius  Christ 
was  identical,  personally  one,  with  the  highest  in  the 
liighest  realm  he  knew.  Christ's  life  was  the  human  life 
of  God,  His  coming  the  renewal  of  humanity  through  the 
union  of  God  with  man.  He  repeats  in  other  words  the 
simple  religious  modalism  of  St.  John,  but  he  does  so  without 
prejudice  to  more  definite  formulations  of  the  truth.  The 
one  certain  thing  is  that  Christ  is  truly  God  and  man,  no 
less  one  than  the  other. 

Ignatius  nobly  represents  the  living  Christological 
faith  of  which  theology  is  but  the  systematised  exposition, 
and  the  insistent  claims  of  which  have  ruined  many  a 
theory.  In  a  sense,  the  thread  might  well  be  taken  up 
to-day  where  he  dropped  it;  at  all  events  his  pages  are 
extraordinarily  modern,  and  the  passion  in  his  words  keeps, 
and  will  always  keep,  his  thought  fresh  and  vital.  In 
no  sense  a  writer  of  intellectual  power,  he  cuts  his  way  to 
ultimate  realities  by  slieer  energy  of  faith.  It  is  because 
Jesus  Christ  has  mediated  to  him  eternal  life  through 
knowledge  of  the  true  God  that  he  names  Him  the  Divine 
Son.     Himself  little  of  a  theologian,  he  exhibits  the  first 

'  Athauasius  later  rejected  such  exjiressions  as  iniscriptural. 

*  von  der  Goltz,  Ignatius  v.  Antiochien  als  Christ  u.  Theologe,  25-26. 


134  THE    PERSON    OF    JESUS    CHRIST 

stirrings  of  theulugical  interest  in  the  post-apostolic  age ; 
and  already,  it  is  clear,  faith  and  Christ  are  bound  up 
together.  Belief  in  God  and  in  Christ  are  the  same  thing 
in  different  aspects. 

§  4.  The  Gnostic  Christology.  —  Ignatius  lived  and 
wrote  in  full  view  of  Gnostic  speculation.  More  and  more 
it  is  being  felt  that  Gnosticism — an  atmosphere  rather  than 
a  system — is  more  easily  comprehensible  in  the  light  of  the 
general  history  of  religion  than  as  a  form  of  Christianity. 
Looming  on  the  horizon  by  the  year  60,  it  became  really 
dangerous  in  the  first  half  of  the  second  century, 
striving  as  it  did  to  capture  the  Gospel  for  the  philosophy 
of  the  age.  The  Church  was  to  be  turned  into  a  mystery- 
society  or  a  speculative  school.  At  the  root  of  all  Gnostic 
systems — and  they  are  legion  ^ — lay  the  idea  of  redemption, 
and  the  conviction  that  it  was  to  be  won  by  a  rare  kind  of 
knowledge.^  In  a  way,  Christ  was  made  the  centre  of 
all.  Not  only  so;  at  first  sight  it  might  appear  as  if 
the  Gnostics  were  engaged  in  a  more  serious  and  impressive 
effort  to  construe  the  person  of  the  Lord  than  their 
orthodox  assailants.  But,  on  the  one  hand,  their  Chris- 
tology was  incurably  docetic.  Partly  owing  to  the 
accepted  metaphysical  opposition  of  spirit  and  matter, 
partly  through  a  tendency  to  see  in  all  things  earthly 
a  mystic  allegory  of  great  cosmic  redeeming  processes. 
His  life  in  flesh  was  dissolved  in  unreal  appearance. 
Valentinus  says  that  Jesus  did  not  eat  or  drink  like  other 
men,  and  that  He  passed  through  Mary  merely  as  a 
channel.  By  some  His  birth  was  totally  denied,  and  of 
course  the  same  principle,  when  applied  to  His  death  on 
the  cross,  robbed  it  of  the  value  of  a  real  passion.  On  the 
other  hand,  the  distinctive  feature  in  Gnosticism  was  its 
sharp  separation  between  a  Christ  who  is  not  truly  human 

1  On  the  many  shades  of  Gnostic  Christology,  see  a  vaUiable  note  in 
Seeberg,  op.  cit.  i.  238. 

2  What  Christ  does   for  men  is  to  reveal  transcendent  secrets,  though 
there  are  more  mystical  suggestions. 


THE   GNOSTIC    CHRISTOLOGY  135 

and  a  Jesus  who  is  not  Divine.  "  Christ "  is  an  Aeon  wlio, 
being  "  a  wonderful  concentration  of  the  light  and  virtue 
of  the  rieroma,"  or  hierarchical  Divine  cosmos,  has  come 
down  and  joined  Himself  somehow  to  the  IMessiah  of  the 
Demiurge,  Jesus,  that  He  may  infuse  a  higher  mysterious 
knowledge  into  receptive  souls,  thus  rescuing  for  the 
supernal  world  nobler  elements  previously  immersed  in 
matter.  The  union  of  Christ  and  Jesus,  some  held,  began 
at  the  baptism  in  the  Jordan,  and  terminated  just  before 
death,  the  precise  moment  of  separation  being  signalised 
by  the  cry :  "  Fatlier,  into  Thy  hands  I  commend  My 
spirit."  Basilides  taught  that  Simon  of  Cyrene  was 
crucified  in  Jesus'  room.  Thus  Christ  is  to  be  sought 
behind,  not  in,  the  personality  of  Jesus. 

That  Christian  ideas  enter  into  this  construction  is 
of  course  not  to  be  denied.  The  central  significance  of 
Christ  is  vigorously  affirmed,  and,  so  far  as  concerns 
practical  religion,  Harnack  is  probably  right  in  saying 
that  to  the  majority  of  Gnostics  Christ  was  a  Spirit, 
consubstautial  with  the  Father.^  His  person,  His  teaching, 
His  career  were  recognised  as  an  in-breaking  of  supreme 
remedial  energies  from  above.  Yet  a  believing  instinct 
led  the  Church  past  the  danger.  Apart  from  the  docetic 
taint,  apart  from  the  indifference  to  history  as  also  from 
the  fact  that  Gnosticism  turns  on  cosmic  rather  than 
ethical  ideas,  it  was  not  even  certain  after  all  whether  the 
Eedeemer  came  from  the  highest  God  or  not.  He  came 
out  of  the  Pleroma,  but  was  not  His  divinity  such  as 
might  be  predicated  of  many  Aeons,  all  less  than  God  and 
more  than  man  ?  Ambiguity  on  this  point  disqualified 
Gnosticism  as  a  substitute  for  a  faith  that  clung  to  history, 
and  in  that  history  found  very  God.  At  the  same  time 
Gnosticism  wakened  up  the  Church  to  more  strenuous 
reflection,  and  drove  orthodoxy  from  a  bare  assertion  of 
historic  facts,  though  it  cannot  be  said  that  the  spokes- 
men  of    die    faith    altogether    succeeded    in    avoiding    or 

^  History  of  Dogma,  i.  "260.     It  is  worth  noting  that  o/xoovaios  t(}  irarpl  is 
originally  a  Gnostic  phrase. 


136  THE    PERSON    OF   JESDS    CHRIST 

surmoimting  the  dualism  which  heresy  had  thus  so  plainly 
taught. 

Echoes  of  Gnostic  Christology  came  later  from  Marcion 
(died  about  165).  He  maintained  that  the  good  God — 
in  contradistinction  from  the  Demiurge  who  had  made 
the  world — took  pity  upon  men,  and  that  in  the  fifteenth 
year  of  the  Emperor  Tiberius  Christ  Jesus  came  down 
from  heaven  as  a  saving  spirit  (spiritus  salutaris),  assumed 
a  phantasmal  body,  and,  as  manifesting  the  highest  God, 
began  to  preach  in  the  synagogue  at  Capernaum.  But 
his  doctrine  has  curious  inconsistencies.  He  may  have 
identified  Christ  with  the  good  God;  in  that  direction 
lay  all  his  religious  interests.  Yet  at  times  there  is  a 
clear  distinction.  And  it  is  remarkable  that,  with  all  his 
docetism,  to  which  the  idea  of  human  birth  or  growth  is 
intolerable,  he  yet  attaches  a  high  value  to  the  crucifixion 
inflicted  on  Christ  by  the  Demiurge.  Here  also  the 
Church  felt  that  the  faith  of  the  Incarnation  is  evaporated 
in  unhistoric  fancies. 

§  5.  The  Apostles'  Creed. —  Moving  out  into  a'  wider 
field,  let  us  now  observe  the  profound  influence  exerted  by 
the  earliest  forms  of  what  is  known  as  the  Apostles' 
Creed.i  The  present  Latin  text  goes  back  only  to  the 
eighth  century,  or  possibly  to  the  sixth;  but  its  main 
contents  can  be  traced  much  farther,  and  scholars  describe 
it  as  the  Gallican  recension  of  the  shorter  Koman  symbol, 
that  is,  the  symbol  used  in  the  Church  of  Kome  from  the 
third  century  onwards,  and  venerated  there  as  an  apostolic 
heirloom.  There  is  virtual  agreement  that  the  original 
Greek  text  of  this  Baptismal  Creed  was  in  existence  before 
150  ;  how  long  before  is  still  disputed.  Kattenbusch  makes 
Ptome  its  birthplace  about  100,  Harnack  about  150  ;  Zahn 
and  Loofs,  more  or  less  following  Caspari,  look  for  its 
origin  to  Asia  Minor,  and  date  it  somewhere  in  the  period 
100-130.  We  are  not  concerned  here  with  the  details 
of   the  problem ;  and  interesting   as   are  the  variations  in 

1  Cf.  Loofs,  Leitjaden*,  87-88. 


THE   apostles'    CREED  137 

the  earliest  Greek  and  Latin  forms,  they  are  of  no 
religions  importance.^  Bnt  we  should  note  the  triadic 
terms  in  which  the  Christian  faith  is  henceforward  ex- 
pressed. From  this  time  on  the  Church  professed  a 
knowledge  of  God,  and  taught  it  to  her  catechumens, 
which  grasps  Him  as  Father,  Son  and  Holy  Spirit.  With- 
out this  the  Christian  faith  in  God  cannot  be  put  in  words ; 
the  God  of  redeeming  power  and  truth  is  these  three  in 
unity. 

The  second  article  of  the  Apostles'  Creed,  according 
to  our  most  ancient  source,  Marcellus  of  Ancyra,  is  as 
follows : — 

(JTfCTTei/ft)  ei9  6eov  TravTOKpdropa')  kuI  et?  Xpiarov 
Irjaovv,  Tov  viov  avrov  tov  /xovoyevt],  rov  Kvpiop  i]pb6i)v,  rov 
yewTjOivTa  e/c  Trveu^aro^;  dyi'ov  kuI  Mapiaf  tij^;  irapOevov, 
TOV  eirl  Hovrlov  Uikdrov  (rravpcoOevTa  Kal  ra^evra  Kal 
Ty  Tpirrj  rjju,6pa  dvaardvTa  e/c  Toiiv  veKpcov,  dva^avra  et? 
Toi/?  oupavoixi  Kal  Kad/jfieuov  iv  Be^ia  rov  irarpo^,  66ev 
ep'^eTai,  Kpiveiv  ^covra^  Kal  veKpov'i.'' 

This  is  obviously  a  commixture  of  supernatural  and  historic 
facts,  with  virtually  no  commentary  or  interpretation. 
And  history  is  insisted  on  because  the  Church  stood  con- 
fronted with  a  reasoned  docetism,  and  found  its  most 
powerful  weapon  of  defence  in  a  simple  recital  of  the 
facts  of  Christ's  career.  The  truth  is,  we  owe  the  article 
just  quoted,  not  to  any  desire  to  exhibit  Jesus  Christ  as 
a  marvellous  Divine  being,  but  to  an  instinct  for  the 
Redeemer's  true  humanity.  Hence  the  enumeration  of 
the  main  points  of  His  life,  from  a  real  birth — human 
though    miraculous — through    passion,   death,    burial,  and 

^  This  is  true  even  of  the  question  whether  "only  "  (fiovoyevT),  unieum) 
or  "  our  Lord  "  stood  in  the  original  texts  of  the  first  clause  of  the  second 
article.  Such  details  may  be  studied  in  Hahn,  Bibliolhek  der  Symhole  u, 
Glauhensregeln  der  altcn  Kirche^,  22  ff. 

-  Hahn,  §  17.  The  conjectural  reconstruction  of  the  Old  Roman  Symbol 
(R),  given  by  Professor  McGitfert  {Apostles'  Creed,  100),  differs  from  the 
text  given  above  only  in  minor  details,  which  do  not  seriously  modify  the 
sense. 


138  THE    PERSON    OF   JESUS    CHRIST 

resurrection,  to  His    present   session  in  glory  and  future 
coming  as  Judge  of  the  world. 

It  is  illegitimate,  however,  to  suggest  that  all  this 
human  simplicity  covers  and  necessitates  no  higher  impli- 
cations. Is  the  term  "  (only-begotten)  Son,"  for  example, 
applied  to  Christ  merely  in  an  immanent  sense,  in  a 
heightened  mode  of  the  epithet  as  used  in  the  Old 
Testament  ?  Or  does  it  carry  a  transcendent  signification, 
indicative  of  a  Sonship  which  lies  beyond  the  bounds  of 
time?  The  latter  view  is  distinctly  the  more  probable. 
That  the  name  "  Son "  has  its  point  of  departure  in  the 
earthly  life  of  Christ  is  no  reason  for  limiting  it  to  that 
life.  We  have  seen  ground  for  believing  that  the  wider 
usa^^e  is  illustrated  in  the  New  Testament ;  and  as  regards 
the  Apostles'  Creed,  there  can  be  no  doubt  that  previous 
and  contemporary  writers  name  God  "  Father "  not 
relatively  to  the  created  world  merely,  but  with  special 
reference  to  Jesus  Christ.  In  Hernias,  in  the  Epistle 
to  Diognetus,  in  Barnabas,  in  Ignatius,  God  is  essentially 
Father.  Moreover,  belief  in  the  pre-existeuce  of  the 
Divine  in  Christ,  if  not  universal  by  the  middle  of  the 
second  century,  was  very  widespread.  Finally,  there 
is  the  verbal  arrangement  of  the  Creed  itself.  The 
first  two  articles  answer  to  each  other.  "  Can  it  be 
believed,"  asks  Dr.  Swete,  "  that  Fatrem  in  the  first  clause 
of  the  Creed  has  no  prospective  reference  to  Filium  in 
the  second  ? "  ^  On  the  initial  mention  of  the  Father 
follows  that  of  His  "  Son  " ;  and  He,  after  being  designated 
by  His  historic  name,  is  first  put  in  relation  to  God  by 
the  adjective  "only-begotten,"  and  next  in  relation  to 
Christians  by  the  title  "Lord."  Only  as  supramundane 
in  being  could  He  be  worshipped  absolutely  as  Lord  of 
men,  and  by  parity  of  reasoning  only  in  virtue  of  a  pre- 
mundane  and  pre-historic  relationship  could  He  be 
absolutely  "Son"  of  God.  After  this  solemn  appella- 
tion, the  article  proceeds  to  affirm  His  entrance  into 
human   life,  and    to   detail   the    items    of    His    life-story. 

1  The  Aiwstles  Creed,  23. 


THE    apostles'.  CREED  139 

Sou  of  God  from  before  all  time,  He  became  man  through 
the  action  of  the  Holy  Ghost  upon  the  Virgin  Mary. 
Not  even  here,  as  some  have  thouglit,  is  Christ  desig- 
nated "  Son "  exclusively  in  consequence  of  the  Spirit's 
operation.  "What  resulted  from  the  co-operation  of  the 
Holy  Spirit  and  the  Virgin  was  the  man  Jesus,  in  whom 
the  pre-existent  "  Son  "  became  flesh.^ 

We  need  not  here  review  the  specific  points  which  the 
article  cites  from  the  life-experience  of  Christ.  The  anti- 
docetic  trend  of  the  whole  is  manifest.  Thus  it  is  the 
reality  of  our  Lord's  birth,  even  more  than  its  unique 
character,  upon  which  emphasis  is  laid.  The  curiously 
definite  statement  that  the  crucifixion  occurred  under 
Pontius  Pilate  goes  back,  probably,  to  the  early  creed  of 
some  local  church ;  ^  but  its  inclusion  proves  that  the 
primary  interest  of  the  authors  of  the  Creed  was  in  facts. 
Whether  the  prominent  reference  to  the  Ascension  is  or 
is  not  a  departure  from  the  oldest  teaching  (and  here 
Harnack  scarcely  appears  to  have  proved  his  case),  is  a 
question  of  no  great  importance.  In  any  case  the  tran- 
scendent place  occupied  by  Christ  is  sufficiently  indicated 
by  the  assertions  that  He  is  now  at  the  right  hand  of 
God,  and  will  come  thence  in  judgment. 

1  Cf.  Seeberg,  op.  cit.  i.  ISO.  ^  Cf.  1  Ti  Q^K 


CHAPTER   II. 

BEGINNINGS  OF  THE  CHRISTOLOGICAL  DOGMA. 

§  1.  The  Apologists. — The  Greek  Apologists  of  the  second 
century  (the  most  important  names  are  Aristides,  Justin 
Martyr,  Theophihis,  and  Athenagoras)  offer  a  striking 
contrast  to  the  mental  attitude  revealed  in  the  Apostles' 
Creed.  Instead  of  a  plain  recital  of  facts,  they  proposed, 
as  Christian  philosophers,  to  give  a  rendering  of  the  ideas 
of  the  Gospel  in  the  scientific  or  speculative  language  of 
the  day.  In  Christ  they  possessed  what  philosophy  is 
ever  seeking,  and  the  higher  knowledge  given  by  the  new 
faith  they  now  strove  to  make  explicit  in  a  defensive 
statement  of  Christianity.  And  one  idea  or  formula  which 
they  used  to  set  forth  the  dignity  of  Christ's  Person 
affected  later  theology  to  its  depths.  This  was  the 
philosophical  conception  of  the  Logos,  a  speculative  deposit 
of  varied  systems.  The  Apologists  carried  over  this 
elastic  idea  with  them  from  older  studies,  and  in  their 
writings  we  see  the  attempt  being  made  to  combine  it 
with  the  conviction,  native  to  the  believing  mind,  that 
Christ  is  6e6^,  as  well  as  the  consciousness  that  in  point 
of  fact  they  found  themselves  instinctively  paying  Him 
Divine  honour. 

For  the  mind  of  that  age,  be  it  remembered,  the  Logos 
summed  up  all  the  Divine  forces  energising  in  the  worlds 
of    nature    and    spirit.      It    was    "  a    formula    capable   of 

Literature — Engelbardt,  Das  Chrisientttm  Justins,  1878  ;  Holland, 
article  "  Justinus,"  in  Did.  of  Chr.  Biog.  ;  Flemming,  Zur  Beurteilung  des 
Christentums  Justins,  1893  ;  Kunze,  Die  GottesUhre  des  Irenaeus,  1891  ; 
Harnack,  article  "Monarchiaiiismus,"  in  RE.  xiii.  ;  Zahn,  Marccllus  von 
Ancijra,  1867  ;  Stier,  Die  Gottes-  und  Logoslehre  Tertullians,  1899  ;  Fair- 
bairn,  Christ  in  Modern  Theology,  1893. 

140 


THE    APOLOniSTS  141 

expressing  the  trausceiident  aud  uDchangeable  nature  of 
God  on  the  one  hand,  and  on  the  other  His  fulness  of 
creative  and  spiritual  powers."^  The  current  conception 
of  God  being  utterly  abstract  and  transcendent,  a  mediator 
was  required  to  bring  Him  in  contact  with  the  world, 
and  this  function  only  the  Logos  could  fulfil.  To  the 
Apologists,  then,  He  is  in  His  distinct  or  personal  being  a 
product  of  the  Father's  will  {epyov  irpoiToroKov  rov  irarpo';), 
though  eternally  immanent  as  a  principle  in  God,  who  has 
never  been  d\o'yo<i.  In  due  time  He  came  forth  in  order 
to  create  all  things,  "  begotten  from  the  Father,  by  His 
power  and  will,  but  not  by  abscission,  as  if  the  essence  of 
the  Father  were  divided."  ^  Numerically  distinct  from 
the  Father,^  He  is  yet  one  with  Him  in  will.  In  virtue 
of  His  origin  He  is  subordinate  to  the  highest  God,  but 
He  may  be  called  a  second  God,  and  ought  to  be  worsbipped. 
Finite  in  His  own  being,  since  there  was  a  time  when  He 
beo-an  to  be,  He  forms  the  natural  organ  of  revelation  to 
the  finite.  Lastly,  He  has  appeared  in  Christ,  not  in  part 
merely  but  completely.  In  Christ  the  new  law  of  freedom 
has  been  set  forth  in  its  entirety,  but  the  Logos  had 
previously  been  operative  in  the  prophets  of  the  Old 
Testament  and  even  in  heathen  sages.  He  alone  is 
properly  to  be  called  Son.* 

Except  Justin,  none  of  the  Apologists  bestows  any 
particular  attention  upon  the  doctrine  of  Incarnation. 
The  older  idea  that  the  union  of  Divine  and  human  in 
Christ  took  place  at  the  Baptism  is  not  found  in  his  pages ; 
instead,  he  speaks  of  Jesus  the  Christ,  "  being  of  old  the 
Logos  .  .  .  now  by  the  will  of  God  having  become  man 
for  the  human  race  " ;  ^  and  in  one  passage  goes  so  far  into 
detail  as  to  affirm  that  "  Christ,  the  whole  Logos,  who 
appeared  for  our  sakes,  became  alike  body  and  reason  and 
souL"®     This  emphasis    upon  the  presence  of  the  whole 

^  Harnack,  Hidory  of  Dogma,  ii.  207. 

2  Justin  Martyr,  Dialog,  c.  Tri/2^h.  c.  128. 

'  apLd/xui  erepdv  ti.  *  Jpol.  ii.  6. 

•  Ibid.  \.  63  ;  cf.  23.  « Ibid.  ii.  10. 


142  THE    PERSON    OF   JESUS    CHRIST 

Logos  in  the  Saviour  is  characteristic  of  Justin,  and  forms 
the  implicit  ground  upon  which  he  goes  in  declaring  roundly 
that  Christ  is  "  God  and  man."  It  is  a  plausible  view 
which  finds  in  him  the  first  faint  beginnings  of  the 
"  two-natures "  doctrine,  so  influential  in  later  centuries ; 
at  all  events  in  his  contemporary  Melito  of  Sardes  there 
is  a  clear  allusion  to  the  "  two  substances "  in  Christ. 
According  to  Justin,  the  Logos  (who  even  as  pre-incarnate  is 
designated  Christ)  came  down  from  heaven  as  a  Spirit  ^  and 
made  Himself  one  with  the  flesh  conceived  of  Mary.  He 
asserts,  indeed,  that  the  Spirit  and  power  of  God  mentioned 
by  St.  Luke  is  just  the  Logos  Himself,  so  that  Jesus' 
humanity  may  be  described  as  the  creation  or  product 
of  the  indwelling  Logos.  Yet  Jesus  grew  up  like  other 
men,  using  the  proper  means  of  growth,  and  assigning  to 
each  stage  of  the  development  that  which  befitted  it.  The 
risen  and  exalted  Lord  will  hereafter  judge  the  world ; 
meanwhile  His  reign  from  heaven  gives  victory  to  His 
people  over  demons  and  all  evil  powers. 

There  are  indications  in  Justin  that  unorthodox  views 
regarding  Christ's  higher  being  were  not  always  felt  to 
involve  the  forfeiture  of  the  Christian  name.  And  this 
is  intelligible  when  we  recollect  that  for  him  Christ's 
Saviourhood  mainly  consisted  in  His  having  taught  mono- 
theism and  a  new  morality.  "  Becoming  man  according 
to  His  will,  He  instructed  us  in  these  things  for  the  con- 
version and  restoration  of  the  human  race."^ 

All  this  has  value  rather  as  testifying  to  the  profound 
impression  made  by  Christ  on  a  mind  determined  to  be 
philosophic  than  as  a  reasoned  Christological  scheme.  In 
particular,  the  introduction  of  the  Logos-conception  was 
a  dubious  expedient,  and  before  long  it  was  to  prove 
itself  a  weapon  which  men  grasped  only  by  the  blade. 
It  is  little  wonder,  indeed,  that  an  idea  with  so  imposing 
a  history  should  thus  have    been  captured    for  Christian 

'  Terms  are  not  infrequently  employed  which  seem  to  identify  the  Logos 
and  the  Spirit. 
2  Aiml.  i.  23. 


THE   LOG  OS -CONCEPTION  143 

service.  In  terms  St.  John  had  seemed  to  authorise  its 
Christian  usage ;  by  its  suggestion  at  once  of  plurality  and 
unity  it  served  to  convey  the  truth  that  Christ  is  God,  while 
yet  God  is  one  ;  and  its  emphasis  on  the  pre-existence  of 
Christ  gave  credibility  to  faith's  conviction  that  all  things 
good,  fair,  and  true  How,  and  have  ever  flowed,  from  Him. 
But  in  this  world  fallible  men  seldom  act  rightly  without 
mixing  their  right  with  wrong.  It  was  so  now.  In 
St.  John  the  term  Logos  is  obviously  defined  by  relation 
to  the  more  fundamental  "  Son " ;  it  is  secondary  and 
interpretative,  more  particularly  for  a  specific  audience, 
while  "  Son "  is  primary,  because  rooted  in  the  fruitful 
depths  of  history.  In  the  Apologists  this  relation  is  turned 
the  other  way.  Here  "  Logos "  comes  on  the  scene  with 
a  settled  independent  meaning  of  its  own ;  it  stands  for 
the  vast  diffused  world-reason ;  its  antecedents  are  meta- 
physical, not  historical ;  and  from  the  outset  it  is  capable 
of  being  analysed  and  explicated  quite  apart  from  the 
Jesus  of  the  Gospels.  In  this  case  cosmology,  not 
soteriology,  gives  tone  to  the  discussion ;  Christ  is  before 
all  things  the  Logos,  rather  than  the  Son,  of  God.  Thus 
the  mind  of  the  Church,  in  its  Christological  reflection, 
was  encouraged  to  move  by  d>  'priori  lines  of  deduction 
from  the  pre-existent  Divine  Eeason  downwards  to  the 
world,  rather  than  upwards,  by  intuition,  from  the  experi- 
ence of  souls  redeemed  through  union  with  a  historic 
person.  If  Justin  could  describe  the  Logos  as  "  a  certain 
rational  power,"  then  the  personal  colour  which  the  believing 
consciousness  insists  upon  in  all  categories  that  concern 
Jesus  Christ  vanishes,  and  the  door  is  opened  wide  to 
ideas  so  mechanical  and  unethical  as  to  be  incongruous 
with  New  Testament  conceptions  of  the  being  and  life  of 
God.  Further,  if  the  Logos  be  defined  as  caused  by  God, 
it  becomes  plain  that  the  subordination  which,  in  one 
sense,  is  an  authentically  New  Testament  idea,  is  on  the 
point  of  passing  into  essential  dualism  and  inferiority. 
So  that  in  certain  ways  Justin  may  be  said  to  have 
anticipated  Arius,  as  moving  too  much  on  the  same  cosmo- 


144  THE    PERSON    OF    JESUS   CHRIST 

logical  plane.  And  when  Athanasius  came  to  the  discussion 
a  century  later,  he  was  forced  to  put  the  Logos  Christology 
aside.  On  the  other  hand,  it  was  particularly  easy  to 
explain  it  in  a  Sabellian  sense.^  Thus  a  review  of  the 
work  of  the  Apologists  more  than  half  inclines  one  to 
acquiesce  in  Loofs'  verdict :  "  Their  doctrine  of  the  Logos 
is  not  a  'higher'  Christology  than  the  common  one;  it 
falls  short  of  tlie  genuinely  Christian  estimate  of  Christ. 
It  is  not  God  that  manifests  Himself  in  Christ,  but  the 
Logos,  a  depotentiated  God,  a  God  who  as  God  is  sub- 
ordinate to  God  Most  High."  ^ 

But  while  Justin's  formulas  thus  led  him  to  contrast 
fatally  the  Father  and  the  Logos,  the  conception  he 
was  endeavouring  to  express  was  in  no  sense  disloyal  to 
Christ.  More  than  once  he  protests  against  being  accused 
of  worshipping  a  mere  man.  Christ,  the  Logos,  is  the 
true  Son  of  God,  and  has  His  place  essentially  in  the 
sphere  of  the  Creator. 

§  2.  Trcnceiis. — Irenaeus,  a  native  of  Asia  Minor,  and 
bishop  of  Lyons  at  his  death  in  or  near  200,  wrote  a  great 
work,  Adversus  Hcereses,  about  the  year  185.  The  influence 
upon  his  mind  of  the  Asia  Minor  tradition  is  shown  in 
a  ruling  tendency  to  keep  to  the  via  media  of  normal 
Christian  thinking,  and  eschew  bold  speculations  on  the 
inner  life  of  Godhead.  Gnostic  or  Apologist  views  of  the 
emanation  of  the  Word,  expressed  in  terms  of  a  material 
hue,    were    especially    distasteful    to    him.      For    no    one 

1  On  the  two  wrong  roads  down  which  men  might  be  led  by  the  Logos 
Christology,  see  a  luminous  note  in  Rainy's  Ancient  Catholic  Church,  205. 
Elsewhere  he  says  (203)  of  the  term  "Logos"  :  "  For  the  domestic  interests 
of  the  faith,  the  use  of  this  word  is  not  indispensable.  TVie  Church  has 
framed  all  her  great  creeds  without  employing  it."  "  If  Christianity  had 
de[)ended  on  the  Logos,"  writes  Mr.  Glover  {Conflict  of  Religions,  303-4), 
"it  would  have  followed  the  Logos  to  the  limbo  whither  went  Aeon  and 
Ap  rrhoia  and  Spermaticos  Logos.  But  that  the  Logos  has  not  perished  is 
due  to  the  one  fact  that  it  has  been  borne  through  the  ages  on  the  shoulders 
of  Jesus." 

2  Leitfaden  *,  129.  Dr.  Samlay  [Christologies  Ancient  and  Modern,  14-21) 
puts  the  other  side  persuasively. 


I  REN  J^.  us  145 

understands  how  the  Son  is  brought  forth  by  the  Father  ; 
His  birth,  by  the  nature  of  the  case,  is  ineffable 
{generatio  inenarrdbilis)}  Gnosticism,  in  opposition  to 
which  Irenaeus  puts  forth  all  his  strength,  has  made  it 
necessary  to  reassert  the  unity  and  simplicity  of  God, 
but  though  God  be  inscrutable  (here  Irenseus  agrees  with 
his  adversaries),  it  is  His  will  to  reveal  Himself  savingly 
to  men.  As  Logos,  indeed,  He  has  always  been  manifested 
in  the  world,  first  through  the  prophets,  finally  in  Christ 
His  Son.  "  Through  the  Word  Himself,  who  had  become 
visible  and  palpable,  was  the  Father  shown  forth  ;  all  saw 
the  Father  in  the  Son :  for  the  Father  is  the  invisible  of  the 
Son,  hut  the  Son  the  visible  of  the  Father."  ^  Alongside  of 
the  modalism  of  such  expressions  are  found  some  faint 
suggestions  of  a  Kenotic  view :  "  Well  spake  he,"  we 
read,"  who  said  that  the  unmeasurable  Father  was  Himself 
subjected  to  measure  in  the  Son ;  for  the  Son  is  the 
measure  of  the  Father,  since  He  also  comprehends  Him."  ^ 
And  again :  "  For  this  cause  the  incomprehensible  and 
boundless  and  invisible  One  made  Himself  seen  and 
apprehended  and  comprehended  by  those  who  believe,  that 
He  might  vivify  such  as  receive  and  behold  Him  by  faith."  ^ 
There  is  a  revelational  identity  of  Christ  and  God. 

Irenseus  starts  from  the  historic  Jesus,  the  God-man, 
not  from  the  cosmic  Logos,  and  his  central  problem  is : 
Why  did  Christ  descend  ?  ^  In  any  case,  Christ  is  the 
Logos  in  human  guise,  with  an  eternal  personal  pre-exist- 
ence  lying  behind  His  earthly  career.  But  it  is  fruitless 
toil  to  build  up  theories  of  His  origin  from  or  in  God, 
whether  as  a  preparatory  approach  to  creation  or  other- 
wise. To  him  as  to  Ignatius  the  pre-historic  One  is  un- 
begotten  (dyevvrjTo^),  and  in  one  place  he  visits  with 
grave  censure  those  "  who  transfer  the  generation  of  a 
word  uttered  by  men  to  the  eternal  Word  of  God, 
assigning  to  Him  a  beginning  of  emergence  and  a  genesis."^ 

1  adv.  Haer.  ii.  28.  6.  ^  j^   g   g_ 

»  iv.  4.  2.  *  iv.  20.  5. 

»ii.  14.  7.  »u.  13.  8. 
10 


146  THE    PERSON    OF   JESUS    CHRIST 

With  equal  energy  he  protests  against  the  Gnostic  differ- 
entiation of  the  Logos  and  the  man  Jesus.  The  Eedeemer's 
person  is  rather  the  abiding  unity  of  God  with  man.  The 
Divine  in  Christ  he  names  "Son,"  apparently,  when  it 
is  desired  to  bring  out  His  relation  to  the  Father,  but 
"  Logos,"  quite  in  the  manner  of  the  Fourth  Gospel,  when 
He  is  contemplated  as  the  great  revelation,  the  Word  or 
Voice  of  God,  making  Him  apprehensible. 

For  Irenffius  the  work  of  Christ  and  His  person  are 
one  organically,  and  we  gain    light    upon  each  from  the 
study  of  both  together.     Humanity,  we  are  told,  lies  in 
sin  and   death.     In  Christ  this  fallen  race  is  saved,  not 
by  mere    teaching    or    enlightenment,  but    in  the   deeper 
fashion  of  what  a  modern  would  call  personal  identifica- 
tion.^    In  His  infinite  love   He  was  made  as  we  are  in 
order  that  He  might    make    us    to    be    as   He  is.       Our 
fleshly    and    corruptible    nature    is,  as    it  were,  fused    or 
inoculated  with  Deity,  and  so  made  immortal.      What  we 
lost  in  the  first  Adam,  we  recovered  in  Christ  the  second 
Adam  ;  ^  for  as  we  become  partakers  of  the  Divine  nature, 
union    with    incorruption    confers    on    us    salvation    from 
corruptibility.      In  other  words,  Christ  saves  by  gathering 
the  entire   race  into    Himself    and    suffusing  it  with  His 
Spirit.     Physical  terms  are  used  freely,  but  it  would  be 
a  mistake  to  imagine    that   Irenaeus  takes  redemption  to 
be  a  purely  unethical  or  material  process.     On  the  contrary, 
for  all  the  weight  laid  upon  the  advent  of  Christ,  as  in 
itself  redemptorial,  it    is    explained    clearly  that  the  In- 
carnate One  had  still  a  woo^k  to  do,  which  invested  His 
life  on  earth  with  real  soteriological  meaning.      He  passed 
through  every  age  of  human  life ;  ^  perfect  as  He  was.  He 
became  an    infant    like    the    rest    of    mankind.  He  faced 
temptation,  He    bowed    Himself    to    the  last  suffering  of 
death.      Nor    is    Irenaeus  without    a   real   interest  in  our 

1  On  the  central  idea  of  recapitidatio  {dvaKecpaXaiuffn),  cf.  Seeberg,  op.  cit. 
i.  325  ff.,  Bethune- Baker,  Early  Hltory  of  Christian  Doctrine,  333  ff.,  and 
Ottley,  Doct.  of  the  IncarnaLioyi,,  i.  219-21. 

Mii.  18.  1.  »ii.  22.4. 


DYNAMIC    MONARCHIANISM  147 

Lord's  moral  growth.  Doubtless  a  note  of  dualism  is 
audible  in  his  statement  that  tlie  Logos  remained  quiescent, 
in  order  that  Christ  might  be  capable  of  being  tempted.^ 
Still,  incarnation  is  taken  to  imply  a  human  soul  as  well 
as  a  body ;  Christ  was  no  mere  human  frame  inhabited 
by  a  higher  Divine  presence.  And  on  the  whole  we  may 
say  that  for  Irenreus,  as  for  St.  John,  the  same  subject 
is  both  Logos  and  man.  "  He  insists,"  says  Mr.  Bethune- 
Baker,  "  that  it  is  one  and  the  same  person — Jesus  Christ 
— the  Logos — the  Son  of  God — who  created  the  world, 
was  born  as  man,  and  suffered  and  ascended  to  heaven, 
still  man  as  well  as  God."  ^  He  is  the  meeting- place  of 
Creator  and  creature :  commixtio  et  communio  dei  et  hominis 
secundum  placitum  patris  facta  est.^  Irenaeus  is  certainly 
more  successful  than  Justin  in  getting  the  idea  expressed 
that  in  Christ  very  God  Himself  has  come  to  us,  for  with 
a  modalism  slightly  more  conscious  and  theoretical  than 
that  of  Ignatius,  he  tends  to  construe  the  Logos  not  as 
somehow  a  portion  of  the  Godhead,  much  less  a  second 
inferior  God,  but  as  God  Himself  breaking  forth  in 
revelation. 

The  main  conceptions  in  this  impressive  scheme  go 
back,  through  Ignatius,  to  the  Fourth  Gospel.  Neither  the 
deity  nor  the  personality  of  the  Son  could  be  dispensed 
with.  But  this  position  naturally  raised  more  questions 
than  it  solved.  Might  this  idea  of  a  God-man  not  imperil 
the  unity  of  God,  not  perhaps  in  a  way  resembling  Gnosti- 
cism, but  after  the  debasing  fashion  of  pagan  polytheisms  ? 
Must  not  the  God  who  appeared  on  earth  be  reckoned  a 
secondary  God,  somehow  numerically  different  from  the 
Lord  of  all  things  ?  These  were  salient  points  of  doubt 
and  controversy  to  which  the  Monarchians  were  to  call 
attention. 

§   3.  Monarchianism. — Can  belief  in  a  real  incarnation 
be  reconciled  with    the    fundamental    Christian   certainty 
that    God    is    one  ?     This,  at    bottom,  was    the    question 
1  iii.  19.  3.  2  pp^  cit.  131.  ^  [y^  20.  4. 


148  THE    PERSON    OF   JESUS    CHRIST 

agitated  by  two  modes  of  thought  which  began  to  make 
themselves  felt  near  the  close  of  the  second  century,  and 
which  resemble  the  older  Ebionism  and  Docetism  on  a 
higher  plane.  The  first  of  these  tendencies  endangered 
Christ's  divinity,  the  second  His  distinction  from  the 
Father ;  and  the  conflict  lasted  rather  more  than  a  century. 
Both  go  under  the  name  Monarchianisin,  though  of  very 
different  types.  The  name  was  drawn  from  their  insist- 
ence on  the  unity  of  principle  in  God  {ixovap'^Lo),  and  it 
was  a  cardinal  point  with  them  to  deny  all  personal 
distinctions  in  the  Divine  Being.  From  Tertullian  we 
can  see  that  they  were  able  to  make  a  very  strong  appeal 
to  simple-hearted  members  of  the  Church. 

(1)  Dynamic  MonarcJiianism} — This,  the  more  rational- 
ist of  the  two  views,  made  its  first  appearance  in  the 
West.  Somewhere  between  189  and  199  a  certain 
leather-merchant  from  Byzantium,  by  name  Theodotus," 
taught  Dynamism  at  Eome,  and  was  excommunicated  by 
the  bishop  Victor.  On  the  ground  that  God  was  strictly 
unipersonal,  he  held  Jesus  to  be  a  man  abnormal  only  in 
being  born  of  a  virgin,  though  distinguished  from  others 
by  exceptional  holiness  and  fidelity.  At  baptism  He  was 
filled  with  a  Divine  influence  or  power  (Sui/a/xi?,  hence 
the  name  Dynamic),  and  exalted  after  the  resurrection  as 
"  Divine."  He  revealed  God  the  Father,  and  may  there- 
fore be  styled  His  Son  and  worshipped.  But  tins  creed 
of  the  Theodoti,  Artemon,  and  their  sympathisers  is  not 
what  we  to-day  should  call  humanitarianism.  If  not  a 
personal  and  pre-existent  Logos,  Jesus  was  yet  a  man  to 
whom  deity  was  gradually  communicated.  Seeberg  helps 
us  by  the  remark  that  what  the  Church  condemned  was 
not  their  assertions  but  their  denials.  These  were  felt 
to  be  perilously  retrograde.  "  Who,"  says  a  Church  writer 
of  the  time,  "  who  does  not  know  the  works  of  Irenseus, 

1  Harnack's  proposal  to  call  this  group  "  Adoptiaii"  is  perhaps  rather 
ill-advised.     See  RE.  iv.  38. 

2  He  is   to   be   distinguished   from   Theodotus   "the   bauker,"   another 
member  of  the  group. 


MODALTSTIC    MONARCHTANISM  149 

Melito,  and  the  rest,  in  which  they  proclaim  Clirist  as 
God  and  man  ? "  Of  course  it  is  possible  to  say  that  this 
party  had  some  externalities  of  the  Synoptic  tradition 
on  its  side.  The  idea,  for  example,  that  Jesus  at  His 
baptism  was  endowed  with  superhuman  power  has  points 
of  real  contact  with  primitive  belief.  But  even  on  their 
own  showing  the  Lord  was  in  no  sense  an  ordinary  man, 
and  some  of  Theodotus'  followers  contended  that  Jesus 
became  God  after  the  resurrection.  The  majority,,  how- 
ever, denied  this,  and  promulgated  views  which,  had  they 
prevailed,  would  have  been  fatal  to  the  continued  existence 
of  the  Christian  society.  Dynamic  Monarchianism,  we 
can  see,  has  certain  points  of  resemblance  to  modern 
liberal  theories,  and  is  on  the  whole  a  tolerably  clear 
example  of  how  often  they  are  not  the  best  theologians 
who  profess  to  dispense  with  theology. 

(2)  Others,  however,  felt  that  a  more  Christian  way 
might  be  found  to  preserve  the  Divine  unity,  and  one  which 
involved  neither  a  ditheistic  Logos  doctrine  nor  a  view  of 
Christ  that  reduced  Him  to  the  plane  of  bare  humanity. 
This  was  the  party  of  modalistic  Monarchians}  or,  as  they 
were  sometimes  named,  not  altogether  unnaturally,  Patri- 
passians.  Numerous  in  Egypt,  for  almost  a  generation 
they  held  the  field  in  Eome.  They  knew  that  Christ 
was  God,  but  they  were  equally  sure  that  God  is  one. 
No  subordination ist  theory  would  suffice.  Hence,  in  the 
full  belief  that  they  had  Scripture  on  their  side,  they 
represented  Christ  as  being  just  the  Father  Himself, 
an  appearance  or  modification  of  the  one  God.  None 
other  than  He  was  born,  suffered,  and  died.  Noetus  and 
Praxeas,  both  from  Asia  Minor,  where  a  naive  form  of 
modalism  was  very  old,  Epigouus,  Cleomenes,  and  (in  a 
sense)  Callistus,  bishop  of  Eome,  are  the  most  prominent 
names.  Tertullian  wrote  against  Praxeas,  Hippolytus 
against  Noetus  and   the    Eoman  bishop.      The  movement 

^  For  a  subtle  estimate  of  the  tendencies  which  might  lead  men  from  one 
form  of  Monarchianism  to  the  other,  see  Rainy,  Anc.  CcUh.  Church, 
215-16. 


150  THE   PERSON   OF   JESUS   CHRIST 

was  at  its  height  in  the  second  and  third  decades  of  the 
second  century. 

The  theory,  then,  was  as  follows  :  Christ  is  the  one  God, 
only  in  a  specialised  mode  or  aspect  making  revelation 
possible.  Johannine  sayings  like  "  I  and  the  Father  are 
one,"  or  "  He  that  hath  seen  Me  hath  seen  the  Father," 
are  meant  literally,  and  imply  a  unity  of  person  as  well  as 
of  essence.  Support  may  also  have  been  found  in  principles 
of  the  Stoic  philosophy  for  holding  that  Father  and  Son  are 
but  two  names  for  one  reality.  According  to  Hippolytus, 
it  was  the  teaching  of  Noetus  that  "  in  so  far  as  the  Father 
is  not  made,  we  rightly  call  Him  Father.  But  in  so  far 
as  He  was  pleased  to  subject  Himself  to  birth,  He  is  as 
engendered  become  His  own  Son,  not  the  Son  of  another."  ^ 
As  invisible,  ingenerate,  impassible,  He  is  Father ;  as 
visible,  generate  and  mortal,  He  is  Son.  And  this  one 
God  was  nailed  on  the  cross,  rendered  up  His  spirit  to 
Himself,  died,  yet  did  not  die,  and  on  the  third  day 
raised  Himself  from  the  grave.  In  Noetus'  own  words : 
"  If  now  I  confess  Christ  as  God,  He  clearly  is  the  Father 
if  He  is  God  at  all.  Now  Christ,  who  Himself  is  God, 
has  suffered ;  hence  the  Father  has  suffered,  for  He  was 
the  Father."  This  is  the  theory  in  brief.  To  the 
objector  who  quoted  the  prologue  to  the  Fourth  Gospel, 
it  was  answered  that  when  St.  John  appears  to  speak  of 
Christ  as  pre-existently  separate  from  the  Father,  he  is 
really  using  the  language  of  allegory.  Praxeas,  a  "  con- 
fessor "  of  Asia  Minor,  is  specially  explicit.  Post  temjms, 
he  is  represented  as  saying,  jjafor  natiis  et  pater  passns, 
ipse  deus,  dominus  omnipotens  Jesus  Christus  praedicatur.^ 
This  drew  from  Tertullian  the  biting  phrase  that  one  of 
the  two  jobs  Praxeas  had  done  for  the  devil  at  Eome 
was  to  crucify  the  Father.^  Elsewhere  he  remarks  that 
the  God  of  Praxeas'  creed  is  a  "  turncoat "  {versi'pellisy 
Sometimes  an  effort  was  made  to  avoid  the  conclusion 
that  the  Father  suffered  by  distinguishing  in  the  Lord's 

1  Rep.  ix.  10.  ^  Tert.  adv.  Prax.  2. 

3  Ibid.  1.  *  Ihid.  2. 


SABELLIUS  151 

person  between  tlie  flesh,  which  is  Son,  and  the  spirit, 
which  is  Father :  filium.  carnem  esse,  id  est  hominevi,  id  est 
Jesum,  patrem  autem  spiritum,  id  est  deum,  id  est  Christum  ;  ^ 
Jiliiis  patitur,  pater  vcro  compatitur.^  But  this  clearly 
gives  lip  the  point  of  Modalism. 

There  are  heresies  and  heresies ;  some  erring  in  the 
statement  of  the  faith,  others  denying  it  outright.  And 
it  is  impossible  not  to  feel  that  Monarchianism  of 
the  modalistic  type  is  of  the  more  venial  kind.  It 
attracted  many  earnest  and  devout  men.  Noetus'  ex- 
clamation, as  reported  by  Hippolytus — "  How  can  I  do 
harm  by  glorifying  Christ  ? "  ^ — is  significant.  Patri- 
passianism  indeed,  though  it  resulted  from  the  application 
of  an  imperfect  scheme  of  conceptions  to  the  older  and 
purely  religious  modalism  of  Ignatius  and  Irenaeus,  was 
from  one  point  of  view  no  more  than  a  vigorous  affirmation 
of  the  basal  certainty  that  in  Jesus  Christ  we  find  God 
Himself  personally  present  for  our  salvation.  However 
mistakenly,  it  aimed  at  serving  the  interests  of  faith. 
For  many  who  resented  the  subtleties  of  theological 
debate,  it  must  have  offered  itself  as  an  effective  working 
theory.  But  the  equilibrium  of  the  doctrine  was  peculi- 
arly unstable.  In  Praxeas'  hands  it  came  very  near  to 
Docetism.  He  recognised  no  human  soul  in  Jesus,  and 
the  flesh  which  with  him  did  duty  for  complete  human 
nature  can  hardly  have  been  more  than  a  bare  selfless 
vesture  of  the  indwelling  God.  Already  there  are  faint 
anticipations  of  Apollinaris.^ 

The  classic  representative  of  this  species  of  Modalism 
has  been  found  by  later  times  in  Sabellius,  a  native  of 
Egypt  who  lived  in  Eome  about  220.  But  in  reality 
Sabellius  was  only  unusually  frank.  A  comparison  with 
Noetus  shows  that  scarcely  anything  was  new  in  his 
teaching    save  the   inclusion  of    the    Holy  Spirit    in    the 

1  Tert.  adv.  Prax.  27.  *  Ibid.  29. 

*  ri  ovv  KaKOv  Trotu),  So^a^oov  top  "Kpiffrbv  ; 

*  On  the  Monarchian  niovenieut  as  a  whole,  see  an  inroiniing  article  by 
Professor  Warfield  in  the  Princeton  Theological  Beview  for  Oct.  1905. 


152  THE   PERSON    OF   JESUS    CHRIST 

modalistic  scheme.  For  him  also  the  Divine  in  Christ 
has  no  personal  subsistence,  but  is  a  mere  passing  phase 
of  the  one  deity,  who  is  denoted  by  the  name  vloTrdroyp. 
Three  phenomenal  aspects — Father,  Son,  and  Spirit — are 
referred  to  a  transcendent  Godhead  which  remains  immut- 
able behind  them  all.  In  the  prosopon  of  the  Father, 
God  acted  as  Creator  and  Lawgiver ;  in  the  prosoyon 
of  the  Son  as  Eedeemer,  from  the  birth  at  Bethlehem 
on  to  the  ascension ;  thenceforward  as  the  Holy  Spirit. 
Epiphanius  relates  that  Sabellius  used  to  compare  the 
Father  to  the  orb  of  the  sun  as  we  see  it,  the  Son  to  its 
light,  and  the  Spirit  to  its  heat ;  while  Athanasius  adds 
that  he  described  the  Father  as  being  expanded  into  the 
Son  and  the  Spirit.^  These  three  Divine  phases,  then, 
correspond  to  three  periods  of  revelation — the  Old  Testa- 
ment, the  New  Testament,  and  the  subsequent  history 
of  the  Church  ;  the  entire  development  making  up  the 
unified  history  of  God's  self-manifestation.  But  what  is 
of  first-rate  importance  in  the  system  is  Sabellius'  explicit 
declaration  that  these  revelational  aspects  of  God  are 
successive  and  temporary.  For  him  God  is  not  Father, 
Son,  and  Spirit  simultaneously ;  only  as  one  aspect  ceases 
to  be  does  another  rise  into  existence.  This  is  a  far- 
reaching  divergence  from  the  Church's  doctrine  of  the 
Divine  "economy,"  to  which  otherwise  it  approximates. 
From  certain  indications  Sabellius  appears  to  have 
modified  the  rigour  of  his  logic  so  far  as  to  hold  that 
after  all  the  Father  predominates  throughout  the  entire 
process  of  revelation ;  in  the  Son  and  Spirit  He  is  still 
somehow  operative,  as  the  Godhead  par  excellence,  reveal- 
ing itself  in  temporary  forms.  But  on  one  point  he 
stood  firm — neither  Son  nor  Spirit  has  personal  sub- 
sistence. 

The  point  of  view  was  admirably  simple  in  its  logic. 

Sabellianism  is  only  Modalism    quite  conscious  of    itself, 

and  formulated  in  such  a  manner  as  to  bring  out  glaringly 

some  of  the  defects  of  the  Logos  doctrine  held  by  Origen 

*  Or.  c.  Arianos,  iv.  25. 


SABELLIANISM  153 

and  Tertullian.  And  it  is  not  dillicult  to  assion  one 
reason  for  its  oft-repeated  failure  to  win  the  Chuicirs 
confidence.  This  is  its  definite  negation  of  the  existence 
of  the  Divine  Christ  after  His  ascension.  In  His  earthly 
life  He  was  God  ;  at  its  close  He  was  again  absorbed,  like  a 
sunbeam  retracted  once  more  to  its  native  source  in  the  sun. 
This  was  more  than  a  dubious  Trinitarian  theory  ;  it  was 
an  attempt  upon  the  immediate  certainties  of  the  Christian 
mind,  and  would  in  itself  have  been  enough  to  discredit 
explicit  Sabellianism  with  believers.  And  in  point  of 
history,  many  theories  which  critics  have  described  as 
Sabellian  really  lack  the  distinctive  feature  of  authentic 
Sabellianism ;  they  ignore  the  successiveness  of  the  phases, 
and  what  is  in  consequence  the  merely  temporary  being 
of  the  Divine  Christ. 

The  extremer  views  of  Sabellius,  however,  must  not 
be  charged  upon  the  Medalists  generally.  Indeed,  there 
is  ground  for  holding  that,  as  compared  with  the  Logos 
Christology,  they  had  a  truly  concrete  view  of  the  historic 
Christ,  and  stood  for  a  conception  that  did  more  justice 
to  religious  faith.  Eeflective  modalism  was  initially  only 
a  one-sided  statement  of  the  unity  of  nature  subsisting 
between  the  Son  and  the  Father.  As  against  this,  Ter- 
tullian had  an  easy  task  in  proving  that  the  New  Testa- 
ment implies  the  distinct  personality  of  the  Son.  And 
Athanasius  and  Hilary  press  home  the  objection  that 
writers  like  Praxeas  dissolve  the  whole  redemptive  economy. 
"  In  his  view,"  writes  Athanasius,  "  the  Father  becomes 
the  Son,  and  with  the  absorption  of  the  Son  the  Father 
also  is  no  more — which  means  a  Christianity  without 
Father  and  Fatherhood,  hence  also  without  Divine  Sonship. 
On  the  other  hand,  the  Son  remains  a  mere  name,  and 
disappears  along  with  the  Spirit  once  His  mission  is 
accomplished."  1  It  was  felt  that  Sabellius  had  fallen 
back  into  the  hard  monotheistic  abstractions  of  Judaism. 
Basil,  indeed,  makes  this  charge  directly.  At  a  Synod 
in  the  year  261,  Sabellianism  was  condemned. 

^  Cf.  Thomasius-Bonwetsch,  Doymengeschiclde,  i,  189  f. 


154  THE   PERSON    OF   JESUS    CHRIST 

§  4.  Tertullian. — In  Tertullian,  the  passionate  and 
inexhaustibly  energetic  Western,  whose  literary  activity 
may  be  placed  between  195  and  220,  we  encounter 
a  form  of  Christology  whose  main  features  took  shape 
in  the  heat  of  the  Monarchian  controversy.  A  Stoic 
by  philosophic  training,  Tertullian  was  converted  and 
ordained  at  Eome.  His  theory  of  the  Logos,  at  which 
we  must  first  glance,  is  in  great  measure  an  inherit- 
ance from  the  Apologists,  but  expanded  and  deepened. 
First  existent  in  God,  as  it  were  anticipatively  or  in 
potentiality,  the  Logos  arose  out  of  God  as  Son  by  genera- 
tion before  all  worlds,  being  thus  projected,  or  invested 
with  independent  being,  with  a  view  to  the  creation  of  the 
universe.  Thus  He  had  a  beginning :  fnit  tempus,  cum 
filius  non  fuit}  Pr  8^^  fills  a  large  place  in  these  specu- 
lations. The  process  of  the  Son's  coming  to  be  is  actually 
described  as  one  of  emanation,  and  the  old  figure  of  the 
sun  and  its  beam  reappears  in  illustration.^  Father  and 
Son  constitute  the  one  Divine  substance,  the  one  as  it  were 
overlapping  and  embracing  the  other:  pater  tola  siibstantia, 
filius  derivatio  d  po7'tio  totius  ^ — a  famous  sentence.  They 
are  differentiated  as  persons,  not  by  division  or  separation, 
but  rather  in  virtue  of  an  economic  distinction.  The 
lines  of  subordinationism  are  strongly  marked.*  In  the 
Father  resides  the  plenitude  of  deity,  in  the  Son  so 
much  only  as  is  consistent  with  His  derived  position 
{pro  modulo  derivationis).^  Things  which  may  not  be 
ascribed  to  the  one  are  predicable  of  the  other.  This 
subordination  holds  even  of  the  pre-existent  Logos.  On 
such  terms,  since  a  sharp  distinction  is  made  between 
the    Divine  existence  now  and  before    the    generation    of 

^  adv.  Herm.  3.  ^  Cf.  the  threefold  simile  in  A2)ol.  21. 

^  adv.  Prax.  9. 

*  Mr.  Bethune-Baker  surely  oversteps  the  mark  in  saying  that  "there 
is  no  suggestion  or  thought  of  subordination,  in  any  other  sense  than  in 
regard  to  origin,  and  even  that  is  merged  in  the  unity  of  substance"  {op. 
cit.  142).  This  is  to  forget  TertuUian's  dependence  on  a  traditional  Logos 
doctrine. 

•^  adv.  Prax.  14. 


TERTULLIAN  155 

the  Logos,  the  Trinitarian  hfe  is  drawn  into  the  processes 
of  time  and  history.  It  is  a  form  of  subordiiiationism, 
so  far,  which,  owing  to  the  cosmological  entanglements 
of  the  Logos  doctrine,  and  the  persistence  of  the  quasi- 
philosophic  assumption  that  God's  essence  lies  in  mystery 
and  abstract  isolation,  and  cannot  therefore  be  communi- 
cated, goes  near  to  wreck  the  validity  for  faith  of  the 
work  of  the  historic  Christ.  At  the  same  time  even 
Tertullian's  most  emphatic  statements  of  subordination  are 
intelligible  enough  as  expressing  a  criticism  of  the  Mon- 
archian  theory.  There  can  be  no  question  as  to  his 
religious  estimate  of  Christ.  He  was  true  God,  only 
in  a  real  and  independent  personality,  which,  although 
never  characterised  as  "  created,"  yet  issued  from  the  God- 
head at  a  distinct  point  in  the  past,  and  in  due  time  will 
finally  be  abdicated,  that  God  may  be  all  in  all. 

TertuUian,  who  expressed  Christian  ideas  in  the 
natural  language  of  a  Eoman,  is  the  first  to  speak 
of  the  Godhead  as  una  suhstantia,  tres  pcrsonae.  Loofs 
rightly  refuses  to  see  in  these  terms  a  deposit  of  the  great 
divine's  training  as  a  jurist.  Substantia  was  a  familiar 
word  in  philosophy,  and  persona,  though  it  originally 
signified  in  law  a  "  party "  or  "  individual "  with  legal 
rights,  had  passed  into  common  speech.  Much  more 
baffling  than  Tertullian's  use  of  legally  flavoured  terms 
is  a  marked  predilection  for  mechanical  and  even  crudely 
physical  images. 

The  pre-existent  Logos  or  Son,  then,  assumed  flesh 
for  our  salvation,  this  being  the  last  stage  in  the  coming 
of  the  Logos  to  full  personal  existence.  He  was  born  of 
a  virgin,  for  as  Son  of  God  He  had  no  need  of  human 
fatherhood.  The  incarnation,  prompted  by  God's  redeem- 
ing love,  was  an  act  of  His  unconditioned  power  and 
freedom,  since  unlike  creatures  He  can  take  a  new  form 
while  yet  remaining  what  He  is.  Thus  TertuUian  does 
not  scruple  to  say  that  God  was  born  and  was  crucified. 
The  resultant  person,  we  are  told,  was  compound  of 
two  substances  (this  rather  than  "  natures "  is  his  term), 


156  THE    PERSON    OF    JESUS    CHRIST 

— spirit  and  flesh,  Divine  and  human  respectively.  In 
one  place,  indeed,  the  soul  of  Christ  and  His  flesh  are 
represented  as  two  substances  making  up  His  humanity, 
the  Divine  Logos  thus  being  a  third.'^  But  his  more 
usual  practice  is  to  speak  of  two  substances  as  united  in 
one  person.  He  holds  with  decision  that  incarnation  is 
not  a  metamorphosis  into,  but  an  assumption  of,  flesh ;  and 
there  is  nothing  against  which  he  contends  more  vigorously 
(so  far  anticipating  the  Monophysite  controversy)  than  the 
view  which  blends  spirit  and  flesh  together  in  a  new  hybrid 
mixture.  "  If  the  Logos  became  flesh,"  he  says,  "  by  a 
transfiguration  and  change  of  substance,  it  at  once  follows 
that  Jesus  must  be  substance  composed  of  two  substances, 
like  electrum  compounded  of  gold  and  silver.  At  this 
rate  Jesus  cannot  be  God,  for  He  has  ceased  to  be  the 
Word  ;  nor  can  He  be  Man  incarnate,  for  He  is  not  properly 
flesh."  2  This  may  be  regarded  as  Tertullian's  genuine 
conviction,  though  phrases  occur  now  and  then,  like  homo 
Deo  mixtus^  ox  filius  Dei  miscens  in  semetipso  hominem  et 
Deiim,^  which  look  the  other  way.  He  insists  frequently 
on  the  permanence  in  Christ's  one  person  of  both  sub- 
stances ;  not  only  so,  each  substance  acts  independently 
and  by  itself,  according  to  its  own  character.  Balva  est 
utriusque  proinietas  suhstantiae.^  The  substances  of  flesh 
and  spirit  are  conjoined,  not  confused.  Videmus  duplicem 
statum,  non  confusum,  sed  conjunctum,  in  una  persona,  deum 
et  hominen  Jesum.^  It  is  worth  noting  that  for  Tertullian 
Christ  is  certainly  an  individual  man,  not  mere  impersonal 
humanity.'^ 

The  paradoxical  character  of  the  Christian  doctrine, 
when  squarely  faced,  so  far  from  being  toned  down,  is 
proclaimed  in  exulting  antitheses.  JVafus  est  Dei  filius ; 
non  pudet,  quia  pudendum  est.  Ft  mortuus  est  Dei  filius ; 
prorsus  credihile  est,  quia  ineptum  est.     JSt  sepultus  resurrexit ; 

^  de  earn.  Christi,  13.  ^  adv.  Prax.  27. 

^  de  cam.  Christi,  15.  *  adv.  Marc.  ii.  27. 

5  adv.  Prax.  27.  "  Ibid. 

"^  The  orthodox  view  a  century  or  two  later  was  different. 


TERTULLIAN  157 

certum  est,  quia  impossihilc}  Yet,  having  once  chosen  his 
formulas,  Tertullian  could  scarcely  avoid  a  certain  dualism, 
which  not  seldom  threatened  to  dissolve  the  union  of  God 
and  man  in  Christ.  The  God  in  Jesus,  he  argues,  needed 
no  baptism ;  nor  may  God  suffer  or  die,  any  more  than 
dishonour  done  to  a  stream  can  touch  the  parent  fountain. 
Hence  the  cry  of  desolation  on  the  Cross  "  was  uttered  in 
order  to  prove  the  impassibility  of  God,  who  forsook  His 
Son  while  giving  the  man  in  Him  up  to  death."  ^  To 
balance  this,  stress  is  laid  upon  the  eternal  nature  of 
the  union,  and  it  is  declared  that  even  in  His  glory  Jesus 
wears  both  the  form  and  substance  of  human  flesh  and 
blood.  The  thought  is  in  a  sense  an  inheritance  from 
Ignatius,^  though  it  has  a  new  definiteness. 

Harnack  has  called  Tertullian  the  father  of  the 
orthodox  doctrine  of  the  person  of  Christ.  That  he 
should  be  so,  in  spite  of  the  hampering  inadequacies  of 
the  Logos  Christology  bequeathed  to  him  by  the  Apologists, 
with  its  suggestions  of  a  reduced  deity  mediating  a 
transcendent  Absolute,  is  the  best  evidence  of  his  amazing 
power.  In  fact,  the  issue  of  his  work  was  to  put  in 
terms  of  the  Logos  conception  a  religious  and  doctrinal 
view  of  Christ  so  rich  and  full  as  ultimately  to  break 
through  its  own  limitations.  It  is  too  much  to  say,  with 
Dorner,  that  Tertullian  marks  the  transition  from  the 
Logos  Christology  to  a  Christology  interpreted  by  Divine 
Sonship  (this  applies  rather  to  Athanasius) ;  yet  it  is 
true  that  he  prepared  the  way  for  the  beneficent  change. 
His  great  phrase,  nihil  tarn  diynum  Deo  quam  hominuvi 
salus,^  involving  an  ethical  rather  than  a  purely  onto- 
logical  idea  of  God,  might,  had  it  been  followed  out,  have 
supplied  a  worthy  background  even  for  his  boldest 
Christological  assertions,  in  which  he  sought  to  laud  and 
magnify  the  grace  of  the  Eedeemer. 

The  Christology  of  Tertullian  was  disseminated  in  the 
West    chiefly    through    the    de    Trinitate    of    Novatian,   a 

1  de  cam.  Christi,  5.  '  adv.  Prax.  30. 

•  Cf.  Smyr.  3.  1.  *  adv.  Marc.  ii.  27. 


158  THE    PERSON   OF   JESUS    CHRIST 

book  which  Harnack  describes  as  a  dogmatic  vade  mecum 
for  the  Latin  Churches.  A  vehement  adversary  of  both 
types  of  Monarchianism,  he  taught,  particularly  as 
against  Sabellius,  at  once  the  real  Deity  of  Christ  and 
the  personal  distinction  of  Father  and  Son.  Christ  is 
true  man  and  true  God.  Yet  so  far  is  Novatian  from 
commingling  both,  that  he  posits  two  Sons  in  the  the- 
anthropic  Person — one  /llius  natiira,  the  other  filius  ex 
adoptione.  The  manhood  could  be  put  on  and  off  like 
a  garment.  He  re-echoes  the  subordinationist  strain  of 
his  master,  prophesying  the  future  cessation  of  the  Son's 
independent  being,  even  though,  strange  to  say,  he  appears 
to  hold  the  existence  of  the  Son  to  have  been  eternal  in 
the  past.  The  vis  divinitatis,  "  having  been  sent  forth, 
and  also  given  and  directed  to  the  Son,  circles  back  to 
the  Father  in  virtue  of  the  communion  of  substance."  ' 
1  (U  Trin.  31. 


CHAPTER  III. 

THE  ASCENDANCY  OF  THE  LOGOS  DOCTRINE. 

§  1.  The  Alexandrian  Theologians  :  (a)  Clement. — As  we 
turn  to  the  Christological  work  of  the  great  Alexandrian 
Fathers,  it  is  needful  to  realise  the  conditions  of  thought 
and  feeling  in  view  of  which  they  wrought  out  their 
systems.  On  the  threshold  of  the  third  century  began  a 
striking  revival  of  the  religion  of  Mithras,  a  primaeval 
god  of  the  Aryans,  which  affected  virtually  the  entire 
Eoman  world.  Thenceforward  for  more  than  a  hundred 
years  Mithraism  and  Christianity  struggled  for  mastery, 
each  professing  to  satisfy  man's  craving  for  blessedness 
and  eternal  life.  Christianity  won  because  it  is  a  faith 
grounded  in  history.  The  authentic  and  concrete  revela- 
tion in  the  historic  person  of  Jesus  proved  stronger  than 
all  the  mysteries.  Meanwhile  tlie  religion  of  educated 
men  was  growing  eclectic  and  syncretist.  A  sort  of 
monotheistic  worship  of  the  sun ;  the  adoration  of  great 
men  of  the  past,  as  Pythagoras  and  Apollonius  of  Tyana — 
these  may  illustrate  the  prevailing  tendencies ;  and  it  is 
a  fair  question  whether  the  biographies  of  these  men  did 
not  owe  something  to  the  wish  to  present  a  heathen  Christ 
superior  to  our  Lord. 

Nor   must   we    overlook    the    philosophic    movements 

Literati  RE — Bigg,  Christiaih  Platonists  of  Alexandria,  1886  ;  Bon- 
wetsch,  article  "Clemens  von  Alexantlrien,"  in  RE.  iv. ;  Preuschen,  article 
"Origenes,"  RE.  xiv.  ;  Westcott,  Religious  Thought  in  the  West,  1891  ; 
Hatch,  Hihhert  Lecture.^,  1890  ;  Eedepenning,  Origenes,  1841-46  ;  Gwatkin, 
The  Knowledge  of  God'^,  1908;  Bonwetsch,  Die  Theologie  des  Methodius, 
1903  ;  Routh,  Reliquiae  sacrae-,  1848  ;  PHeidertr,  Gifford  Lectures,  1895  ; 
Allen,    The   Coilinuity   of   Christian    Thought,    1885 ;    Liddon,    Bampton 

Lectures,  1866. 

169 


160  THE  PERSON    OF    JESUS    CHRIST 

of    the    time.       Two    of    the    biographers    of    Pythagoras 
were  Porphyry  and  lauiblichus,  distinguished    leaders   of 
the    Neo-Platonic    school,    which    had    been    founded    by 
Ammonius    Saccas,  a    teacher    of    Platonic   philosophy  at 
Alexandria.      The  system  of  which  he  was  the  expositor 
received  its  most  perfect  expression  at  the  hands  of  his 
pupil  Plotinus,  whose    life    extended    from    205    to   270. 
It  may  be   described    as  a    kind    of    dynamic  pantheism. 
There  are  three    great    cosmic  principles.^     Primal  being 
resides  in  the  One,  the  Infinite,  the  Good,  which  is  beyond 
and    above    all    attributes,    whether    of    thought,  will,    or 
enercy,  and   yet  is  the  uncaused  and  moveless  source  of 
all    existent    things.      Next     comes    the    Nous,    its    exact 
emitted  image  and  the  archetype  of  lower  being,  embracing 
in  itself  likewise  the  supersensible  world  («oo-/i09  vo7jTo<i). 
And  lastly  the  Nous  gives  forth,  as  its  product  and  copy, 
the    Soul    or    Psyche,  related    to    the    Nous    in    turn    as 
the  Nous  is  to  the  One.     Placed  between  the  Nous  and 
the  world  of  phenomena,  it    shares    in    some   degree  the 
character  of  both.     Material  nature  is  meant  to  be  subject 
to  Psyche.     But  in  actual  existence  this  intended  harmony 
of   subordination  is    displaced    by  strife,  the  result  being 
that    the     entire    phenomenal     system    is     shot    through 
with  illusion  and  vanity.      Somethiag  in  the  very  essence 
of  matter  condemns    it    to    be    a    principle    of    darkness. 
Hence  to  be  born  into  corporeality  signifies  that  the  soul 
has  fallen  into  the  toils  of  sensuality,  though  redemption 
is   not    impossible.      Each    soul    must    leave  the  material 
behind  and  rise  to  the  region  of  Divine  knowledge,  and 
even    in    the    present    life  we    may  approximate   to  this, 
above  all  through  the  medium   of    passive  intuition.      In 
perfect  receptivity  and  repose  the    soul  is  able  to  touch 
and  grasp  God  directly,  losing  itself  in  the  Divine  with  a 
silent  rapture  or  ecstasy  of  unutterable  feeling.     Porphyry 
relates  that  to  his    own    knowledge    Plotinus  tasted  this 
supreme  bliss  on  four  distinct  occasions. 

1  To  each  of  these  potencies  the  name  viroaracns  is  given,  indicating  that 
they  represent  the  Divine  in  specific  forms  or  modes  of  existence. 


NEO-PLATONISM  161 

It  is  customary  for  historians  to  deny  that  Neo- 
Platonisni  is  dualistic,  and  to  contrast  it  in  this  respect 
with  Gnosticism,  against  which  Plotinus  wrote  vehemently. 
Yet  the  idea  of  matter  whicli  Neo-Platonists  assumed, 
as  of  something  indefinite,  formless,  evil,  came  very  near 
to  pure  dualism.  We  learn  that  Plotinus  was  ashamed 
of  his  body. 

A  system  of  this  kind,  obviously,  would  act  as  a  foil 
to  Christianity,  rather  than  as  its  intellectual  model.  The 
influence  of  Neo-Platonism  on  Church  thinkers  has  been 
much  exaggerated.  Doubtless,  like  the  writers  of  the 
New  Testament,  the  Fathers  may  not  have  disdained  to 
borrow  from  their  rivals  this  or  that  technical  expression, 
without  prejudice  to  its  new  Christian  meaning,  or  to 
learn  something  of  the  art  of  formal  ratiocination.  But 
men  like  Tertullian  and  Origen  were  after  all  seeking  to 
theologise  upon  a  faith  anchored  to  historical  realities ; 
the  Neo-Platonists,  on  the  other  hand,  were  bent  on  a 
metaphysical  cosmology.  Their  trinity  and  the  Trinity 
of  Church  writers  have  scarcely  anything  in  common  but 
the  number  three.  Furthermore,  their  idea  of  matter 
barred  out  incarnation  from  the  first  as  inconceivable.  To 
Porphyry,  Christ  was  a  pious  sage  wlio  may  well  have 
risen  to  immortality  after  death,  but  one  whose  place  is 
distinctly  beneath  Pythagoras.  His  followers,  it  was 
argued,  had  mixed  His  doctrine  with  falsehood,  and 
abandoned  His  toleration  of  other  faiths. 

It  is  in  a  world  filled,  or  being  filled,  with  religious 
and  philosophical  influences  of  this  description  that  we 
must  picture  Clement  of  Alexandria,  and  especially  Origen, 
at  work.  The  Gospel  had  to  be  stated  defensively  in  an 
extremely  difficult  situation.  The  task  of  the  Apologists 
must  be  resumed,  and  the  adversary  beaten  with  his 
own  weapons.  And  Christ  had  to  be  set  forth,  not  as 
the  Saviour  of  the  world  merely,  but  as  One  in  whom 
lay  hid  the  treasures  of  wisdom  and  knowledge ;  for  men 
felt  there  was  a  specifically  Christian  gnosis,  and  neither 
the  name  nor  the  idea  could  be  dispensed  with. 


162  THE    PERSON    OF   JESUS    CHRIST 

Clement  is  said,  with  much  probabihty,  to  have  been 
a  native  of  Athens.  A  pupil  of  Pautaenus,  one  of  the 
best  teachers  in  the  institution  known  as  the  Catechetical 
School  of  Alexandria,  he  was  himself  a  member  of  the 
staff  more  or  less  from  190  to  216.  The  faith  of 
Irenseus  and  TertuUian  he  too  shared  with  conviction ; 
evidently,  however,  he  regarded  himself  as  free  to  construe 
its  elements  with  a  certain  speculative  liberality.  He 
describes  himself  as  a  scholar  of  Tatian,  and  there  are 
frequent  traces  of  the  influence  of  Justin.  With  all  his 
admiration  for  Greek  philosophy  and  intense  sympathy 
with  its  noble  and  inspiring  characteristics,  he  never 
wavers  in  the  conviction  that  Christ  has  brought  to  men 
the  best  and  highest  revelation  of  God. 

This  revelation,  naturally  enough,  Clement  interprets 
by  means  of  the  Logos  doctrine,  with  the  result,  at  all 
events  partially,  of  depersonalising  the  historic  Saviour. 
The  timeless  content  for  which  He  stood,  rather  than 
Jesus  Christ  in  His  concrete  actuality,  holds  the  central 
place.  Through  the  Eternal  Logos  is  revealed  God  most 
high,  who  is  seated  far  above  all  distinction  ;  and  from 
the  Logos  comes  "all  that  there  is  upon  earth  of  beauty, 
truth,  goodness,  all  that  distinguishes  the  civilised  man 
from  the  savage,  the  savage  from  the  beasts."  ^  He  is 
freely  named  Son,  and  in  that  character  separated  by  an 
absolute  gulf  from  things  created.  Precisely  how  Clement 
means  us  to  conceive  the  relation  of  the  Logos  to  the 
Father  it  is  difficult  to  say.^  He  uses  contradictory  modes 
of  expression,  according  as  the  Logos  is  viewed  from  the 
side  of  humanity  or  of  God  Himself.^  From  below  He 
appears  as  the  fulness  of  the  Godhead  concentred  in  an 
independent  life ;  from  above  He  is  the  highest  next  to 
the  Almighty,  the  minister  of  God,  mediating  all  created 
life,  and  at  a  certain  distance  from   the    Father  as    the 

^  Bigg,  Christian  Platonists  of  Alexandria,  T2. 

-  It  is  at  all  events  an  essential  relation.      "  If  God  is  a  Father,  He  is 
at  the  same  time  Father  of  a  Son  "  {Strom,  v.  1.  1). 
^  Cf.  Rede[ieuning,  Orignies,  110-14. 


THE    LOGOS    IN    CLEMENT  163 

absolute  monad.  But  in  a  writer  who  asserts  botli  the 
full  equality  of  Father  and  Son,  and  the  Son's  suljordina- 
tion,  we  are  bound,  I  think,  to  hold  that  the  idea  of 
subordination  is  secondary.  It  is  a  result  of  the  effort 
to  posit  distinctions  in  the  Godhead. 

It  has  been  maintained  that  Clement  makes  an  im- 
portant difference  between  the  Logos  as  in  God,  and  the 
Logos-Son,  to  whom  it  has  been  given  to  become  incarnate. 
But  the  theory,  tempting  as  it  is,  appears  to  depend  on 
a  single  passage  of  doubtful  interpretation.^  The  Word, 
we  are  told,  came  into  the  world,  fashioning  His  own 
humanity;  and  "this  Logos,  the  Christ,  the  cause  both 
of  our  being  at  first  (for  He  was  in  God)  and  of  our  well- 
being,  this  very  Logos  has  now  appeared  to  men.  He  alone 
being  both,  at  once  God  and  man."^  The  continuous 
identity  of  the  Subject  is  put  quite  clearly  ;  the  Logos  "  put 
on  a  man,"  and  was  "  God  in  the  form  of  man,  stainless, 
the  servant  of  His  Father's  will."  ^  A  tendency  to  think  of 
our  Lord's  humanity  as  but  a  garment  brings  Clement 
repeatedly  to  the  verge  of  docetism.  Christ's  body  was 
superior  to  physical  needs ;  "  He  ate,  not  for  the  sake  of 
His  bodily  frame,  which  was  held  together  by  a  holy 
energy,  but  lest  His  companions  should  think  about  Him 
otherwise."^  He  knew  no  pain,  or  grief,  or  emotion, 
and  had  no  need  to  learn.  Theories  which  start,  not 
from  the  historical  Christ,  but  from  the  pre-existent  Word, 
and  proceed  by  way  of  deduction,  will  always  be  in  grave 
hazard  on  the  side  of  docetism,  and  Clement  is  no  ex- 
ception. But  when  it  is  contended  by  some  writers  that 
for  him  "  the  Lord's  descent  into  flesh "  was  no  real  in- 
carnation, but  only  an  extreme  case  of  Divine  inspiration 
or  possession,  we  must  demur.  Not  only  is  Christ's  full 
Godhead  vital  for  Clement,  as  furnishing  a  guarantee  that 
the    revelation    He    brought   was   perfect,   but   there    are 

*  The  question  is  argued  by  Mr.  Bethune-Baker,  op.  cit.  134  f. 
^  Protr.  1.  ^  Ibid.  2. 

*  Strom,  vi.  9  ;  i.e.  to  refute  docetism  by  anticipation.     Cf.  Glover,  The 
Conflict  of  Eeligions  in  the  Early  Roman  Empire,  299. 


164  THE    PERSON   OF    JESUS    CHRIST 

too  many  passages  whose  meaning  is  quite  explicit. 
Thus,  for  example,  He  speaks  of  Christ  as  "a  God  in 
human  form,"  ^  and  elsewhere  says  that  "  assuming  the 
character  of  man,  and  having  been  fashioned  in  flesh.  He 
enacted  the  drama  of  human  salvation."  ^  But  he  cannot 
be  quoted  as  teaching  the  Two  Natures  doctrine ;  for 
the  unity  of  Christ  is  assumed  by  him  rather  than  de- 
monstrated ;  and  indeed  he  scarcely  inquires  at  all 
regarding  the  exact  relations  which  obtain  between  the 
Divine  content  of  Christ's  person  and  its  phenomenal 
human  form. 

§  2.  (b)  Origen.  —  Origen  (185-254),  a  pupil  of 
Clement,  and  his  successor  in  the  mastership  of  the 
Catechetical  School  of  Alexandria,  is  the  supremely  great 
name  among  the  divines  of  the  Christian  East.  An 
Egyptian  by  race,  he  was  the  child  of  Christian  parents. 
His  width  of  interest,  his  learning,  his  fabulous  industry, 
not  least  his  devoutness  and  fine  simplicity  of  nature,  make 
him  a  noble  and  memorable  figure.  As  an  exegete,  in 
spite  of  a  tendency  to  allegorise,  his  services  to  theology 
were  vast.  His  troubled  yet  unceasingly  studious  life 
cannot  be  recounted  here ;  but  the  secret  of  his  wonderful 
influence  is  revealed  in  the  farewell  eulogy  pronounced 
upon  him  by  his  pupil,  Gregory  Thaumaturgus,  bishop  of 
Neo-Csesarea.  Later  ages,  even  those  which  disowned  his 
heresies  most  bitterly,  paid  tribute  to  his  power.  "It 
was  Origen,"  says  Harnack,  "  who  created  the  dogmatic  of 
the  Church,  and  did  more  than  any  other  man  to  win  the 
Old  World  to  the  Christian  religion."  He  was  leader  in 
the  campaign  of  Christian  theology  against  the  varied 
forces  of  pagan  thought,  and  the  thirst  for  knowledge  felt 
by  the  loftier  spirits  within  the  Church  found  its  satis- 
faction mainly  in  his  innumerable  works.  To  his  tireless 
intellect,  theology  was  very  life  and  happiness.  Though 
conscious  of  a  staunch  fidelity  to  the  historic  faith,  he 
felt  it  essential  that  the  contents  of  the  creed  should  at 
^  Pacd.  i.  99.  "  Protr.  x.  110. 


THE    LOGOS    IN    ORIGEX  165 

the  same  time  be  sublimated  by  the  methods  of  reverent 
speculation,  provided  only  tliat  tlie  limits  of  ecclesiastical 
and  apostolic  tradition  were  recognised.  Within  these 
limits  free  discussion  must  have  its  way.^ 

We  turn  first  to  his  doctrine  of  the  Logos.  God  the 
Father — this  is,  as  so  often,  the  point  of  departure — is 
immutable  and  absolute  Being,  self-conscious  Mind  throned 
above  all  mind  and  all  substance.  As  being  perfectly  good, 
He  must  communicate  Himself,  and  it  is  in  the  Logos 
that  He  is  first  made  apprehensible.  This  Logos  or  Son 
(the  two  names  are  freely  interchanged),  being  the  most 
eminent  of  the  Divine  powers  or  ideas,  embraces  within 
Himself  the  whole  contents  of  the  intelligible  world  ;  and 
for  us,  indeed,  it  is  a  higher  thing  to  view  Him  in  this 
light  than  to  dwell- only  upon  the  Christ  incarnate  and 
crucified.  Very  emphatically  Origen  insists  that  the  "Word 
is  personal,  as  well  as  eternally  and  intrinsically  Divine. 
Both  aspects  are  vital.  "  For  him  and  the  men  of  his 
time,"  says  Dr.  Bigg,  "the  great  object  was  to  establish 
the  true  Personality  of  Christ,  to  show  that  though  God 
He  yet  was  not  the  Father."  ^  ^-^ 

As  Son,  then,  the  Logos  proceeds  from  the  Father ; 
not,  however,  by  way  of  partition,  but  as  the  will  does 
from  spirit,  or,  as  he  elsewhere  expresses  it  in  a  great 
phrase  which  has  lodged  itself  in  the  Church's  mind,  by  an 
eternal  generation.  The  exact  words  are :  est  namqne  ita 
aeterna  ac  sempiterna  generatio,  sicut  splendor  generatur  ex 
luce.^  The  nature  of  this  generation  is  ineffable ;  we  only 
know  that  "it  denotes  no  finite  act  either  temporal  or 
pre-temporal,  but  an  eternal  or  intemporal  process  or 
relation."  Hence  to  say  that  a  time  was  when  the  Son 
was  not,  is  an  error  {ovk  icrriv  ore  ovk  rjv).^  As  an 
independent  subsistence,  then,  the  Son  is  numerically 
distinct  from  the  Father,  but  withal  they  are  in  substance 
absolutely  one.  In  essential  content  the  Son  is  ofioovaio'^ 
with  the  Father,  as  vapour  is  with  water  or  children  with 

'  Cf.  the  opening  words  of  the  de  Prliici^iis.  ^  Op.  cit.  p.  166. 

'  de  Princip.  L  2.  4.  *  Cf.  ibid.  i.  2.  9. 


166  THE    PERSON    OF    JESUS    CHRIST 

their  parents.  They  are  two  uTroo-Tacrei?,  not  one,  as 
the  Monarchians  said.  It  is  quite  in  harmony  with  this 
homousia  that  Origen  should  elsewhere  describe  the  Son  as 
"  begotten  of  the  Father's  will,"  for  in  the  spiritual  realm 
no  contrast  exists  between  will  and  substance.^ 

Our  first  impression  is  that  by  this  decisive  assertion 
of  the  homousia  the  co-equality  of  the  Son  with  the  Father 
has  been  secured.  But  it  is  not  so.  Origen  shares,  in  a  real 
measure,  the  subordinationism  of  the  Apologists.  Eegarding 
the  Son  as  "  the  most  ancient  of  all  the  works  "  of  God,^ 
he  does  not  hesitate  to  speak  of  Him  as  a  Krla^ia.^  The 
Son  is  the  second  God,  but  not  immutably  or  intrinsically 
good,  as  the  Father  is.  The  Father's  will  is  wiser  than 
the  Son's ;  at  creation  the  Son  was  the  Father's  servant, 
executing  His  commands.  Most  remarkable  of  all,  while 
practising  prayer  to  Christ  as  Divine,  and  indeed  insisting 
on  it  as  a  duty,  Origen  proclaims  that  there  is  a  still 
higher  object  of  invocation.  "In  the  supreme  moment 
of  adoration,  when  the  soul  strains  upward  to  lay  itself 
as  a  sacrifice  before  the  highest  object  of  thought,  we 
must  not  stop  short  of  Him  who  is  above  all."  *  Here, 
accordingly,  there  is  a  wavering  use  of  terms.  If  the 
result  is  contradictory,  it  is  surely  due  to  a  dithculty  from 
which  the  Christian  theologian  cannot  escape ;  for  the  Son 
may  be  viewed  from  above  or  from  below.  Seen  from 
above.  He  appears  as  the  first  step  towards  man,  and,  in 
addition,  the  content  of  the  word  "  Son  "  must,  for  us,  be 
drawn  from  our  knowledge  of  the  Incarnate  Life;  seen 
from  below.  He  is  the  object  of  religious  faith,  and  ipso 
facto  on  one  plane  of  being  with  God.  In  Origen's  case 
the  difficulty  was  intensified  by  his  desire  to  construct 
a  theory  including  both  Christ  and  the  universe.  Christ 
the  Son  is  not  merely  Saviour ;  He  is  the  World-Keason, 
pervading    and   moulding    all    things.     Hence    He  stands 

1  Loofs,  Dogmcngeschichte,  194.  ^  c.  Cels.  v.  37. 

^  On  such  expressions  the  Arians  fastened,  though  with  only  superficial 
plausibility. 

*  Bigg,  op.  cit.  186. 


SUBORDINATION    OF    THE    SON  167 

midway  between  tlie  Uncreated  and  His  creation,  between 
the  One  and  the  ]\fany,  partaking  in  the  natnre  of  both. 
Allusions  to  the  Spirit  are  even  more  subordinationist 
in  tone. 

In  spite  of  his  assertion  that  the  Logos  incarnate  is 
not  of  first-rate  importance  for  "  gnostics,"  or  Christians 
of  the  intellectual  rank,  Origen's  sketch  of  Christological 
doctrine  ^  was  such  as  to  exert  later  a  profound  influence. 
Faced  with  the  difficulty  of  conceiving  how  the  creative 
and  all-permeating  Logos  could  gather  Himself  into  an 
eartlily  life,  his  solution  was  to  make  the  human  soul  of 
Jesus  a  mediating  bond  uniting  the  infinite  Logos  to  finite 
flesh  {substaniiae  animac  inter  Bcum  et  carncm  medians)^ 
Like  all  souls,  the  soul  of  Jesus  was  pre-existent.  But 
alone  of  all  it  had  kept  its  purity,  and  thus,  quite  apart 
from  the  Incarnation  in  time,  had  become  one  spirit 
indissociably  with  the  Logos ;  the  two  being  fused  in  a 
union  that  "  may  be  compared  to  a  mass  of  iron  glowing 
for  ever  with  a  white  heat."  In  their  unity  they  passed 
into  an  incontaminate  human  body,  born  of  a  virgin. 
Thus  was  constituted  the  God-Man  {6edv6pomo<i) ;  and 
since  the  Eternal  Son  is  the  chief  partner  in  the  resultant 
complex  being,  it  is  fitting  that  the  Incarnate  person  as  a 
whole  should  likewise  be  designated  "  Son,"  and  that  the  Son 
of  God  should  be  said  to  have  suffered  death.  But  though 
Jesus  was,  in  Origen's  view,  a  real  man,  the  normality  of 
His  body  is  not  quite  beyond  suspicion.  True,  it  is  no 
phantasmal  appearance  ;  there  is  no  docetism  in  the  strict 
sense ;  but  neither  is  it  composed  of  coarse  matter :  rather 
it  is  of  ethereal  purity  and  celestially  fair,  with  a  glorious 
briglitness  that  shone  forth  even  upon  earth,  and  was 
manifested  completely  after  death.  Moreover,  the  union 
of  the  Divine  and  human  in  the  one  Clirist  is  represented 
as  permitting  an  equally  real  separation.  The  taunt  of 
Celsus  about  a  crucified  God  is  pointless;  for  of  God  it  is 
impossible   to   predicate  such  things,   and   the  man   Jesus 

^  Cf.  Haniack,  whose  pages  on  this  subject  are  particularly  brilliant. 
*  de  Princip.  ii.  6.  3. 


168  THE    PERSON    OF    JESUS    CHRIST 

alone  suffered  and  died.  "The  Word,  still  remaining 
essentially  the  Word,  suffers  none  of  those  things  which 
are  endured  by  the  body  or  soul;  but,  condescending 
occasionally  to  one  who  is  unable  to  gaze  upon  the 
splendours  and  brightness  of  deity,  He  becomes  as  it 
were  flesh."  ^  In  the  light  of  His  cosmic  functions  tlie 
Loo-os  cannot  be  thought  of  as  confined  to  the  human  life 
of  Jesus ;  even  while  appearing  thus  in  a  form  suited 
to  our  capacities,  He  yet  manifested  Himself  everywhere 
as  before. 

Christ,  then,  is  a  single  complex  being ;  and  in  strong 
contrast  to  the  aspect  of  his  teaching  just  noted,  Origen 
insists  that  between  the  two  phases  or  elements  of  His 
constituted  life  there  obtained  not  a  communion  merely, 
but  a  gradual  merging  and  commingling,  with  the  result 
that  the  humanity  of  Jesus  is  itself  deified  {deificavit  quern 
susceioerat  humanam  naturani).^  In  terms  of  a  later  age,  we 
may  speak  of  a  communicatio  idiomatum.  So  far  did  this 
go  that  in  the  end,  after  the  resurrection,  the  body  was 
completely  absorbed  in  the  Divine  spirit.  The  ascended 
Lord  has  ceased  to  be  man.^  But  from  another  point  of 
view  Origen  felt  himself  justified  in  declaring  that  Jesus' 
humanity  still  persists,  though  His  body  has  been  trans- 
muted into  a  higher  form.  For  His  soul  still  preserves  its 
being,  merged  in  the  Logos  by  an  inner  mystical  union 
wrought  by  its  perfection  of  holy  love.  As  God-Man,  we 
are  told,  Christ  offered  the  sacrifice  which  atones  for  sin, 
and  paid  the  ransom  by  which  the  devil's  power  has  been 
shattered.  This,  it  is  true,  is  always  balanced  by  the 
assurance  that  His  crucifixion  is  of  value  only  for  those 
who  cannot  rise  to  the  apprehension  of  ideal  truth.  "  To 
know  Christ  crucified  is  the  knowledge  of  babes."  But  to 
such  as  need  Him  not,  or  need  Him  no  longer,  in  the 
capacity  of  Physician  and  Eedeemer,  Christ  is  Divine 
Teacher  and  Leader,  who  opens  the  door  of  the  Holy 
Place  of  sacred  mysteries.  Of  love  to  this  Christ,  Origen 
speaks  with  the  most  intense  feeling. 

1  c.  Cels.  iv.  15.  ^  in  Matt.  Serm.  33.  ^  in  Luc.  horn.  29. 


JESUS'    HUMAN    SOUL  169 

There  is  no  trace  in  Origen  of  sympathy  with 
Monarehian  ideas,  against  which  he  directs  various 
passages  of  strong  polemic.  But  he  uses  freely  all 
other  views  about  our  Lord's  Person  which  were  current 
in  the  Church,  dovetailing  them  into  each  other  with 
amazing  skill,  and  adapting  to  his  purpose  not  a  few 
conceptions  which  later  times  banned  as  heretical.  His 
main  conception,  according  to  which  the  personal  Logos 
united  Himself  to  the  personal  soul  (and  so  to  the  body) 
of  Jesus,  differs  noticeably  from  the  tendency  of  earlier 
writers,  like  Irenreus,  to  say  rather  that  the  Logos  became 
man.  This  insistence  on  the  personal  being  of  Christ  qua 
man  is  a  conspicuous  merit  in  his  system.  Even  Clement 
had  spoken  of  the  direct  union  of  the  Logos  with  a 
human  body,  and  later  thinkers  were  apt  to  surrender 
the  position  Origen  had  gained  by  his  clear  perception 
of  Jesus'  soul  as  truly  human.  Yet  in  Origen's  hands  the 
result  was  an  obvious  dualism.  If  in  Christ  we  have 
a  human  subject  which,  as  a  free  moral  personality, 
cleaves  inseparably  to  the  Logos,  and  is  ultimately  lost 
in  Him,  the  total  outcome,  as  Harnack  puts  it,  is  not 
so  much  a  doctrine  of  two  natures  (though  tlie  phrase 
"  two  natures "  does  occur)  as  rather  that  of  two  subjects 
which  gradually  become  amalgamated  with  each  other.^ 
The  human  personality  of  the  Saviour  finally  disappears, 
leaving  only 'its  Divine  content.  Still,  we  cannot  forget 
that  the  unity  which  Origen  strove  to  bring  out  between 
God  and  man  in  Christ  was  a  unity  so  ethically  mediated 
that  it  could  also  be  designated  "  essential "  or  "  sub- 
stantial." He  felt  how  great  was  the  condescension  of  the 
Eternal  Son  in  being  born,  and  by  conceiving  His  advent 
as  a  real  self-exinanition  he  makes  room  for  a  truly  human 
development.  "  Ignorance  and  learning,"  he  writes,  "  per- 
tain not  to  the  Eternal  Wisdom  in  itself,  but  as  it  is  in 
flesh ;  for  Christ  had  to  learn  to  stammer  and  speak  like 
a  child  with  infants."  This  condescension  of  God  to 
human  life  is  met  and  ratified  by  a  capacity  on  the  part 
'  History  of  Dogma,  ii.  373. 


170  THE    PERSON   OF    JESUS    CHRIST 

of  humanity  to  receive  the  essential  life  of  God ;  and 
it  is  probably  in  the  main  as  a  real  eftbrt  to  illustrate 
this  position  that  the  thought  of  Origen  marks  an  epoch 
in  Christology. 

§  3.  The  Correspondence  of  the  Pionysii. — If  Tertullian 
dominated  the  West,  in  the  East  the  influence  of  Origen 
was  supreme.  But  trouble  was  sure  to  result  from 
the  inconsistency  of  his  views — his  assertion  of  the 
homousia,  for  example,  coupled  with  a  distinct  sub- 
ordination of  the  Logos.  How  easily  he  could  be  mis- 
interpreted we  see  in  the  brief  significant  controversy 
of  Dionysius  of  Alexandria  with  Dionysius  of  Eome, 
about  the  year  260.  The  former  had  received  his 
training  in  the  school  of  Origen,  and,  in  fulminating 
against  the  Sabellians  of  Egypt,  had  been  unfortunate 
enough  to  exaggerate  tlie  subordinationism  of  his  master. 
Accentuating  the  distinction  of  Father  and  Son,  he 
declared  that  the  Son  is  the  Father's  creature,  and  was 
not  before  He  came  to  be.  He  has  a  different  ovaia 
from  the  Father,  as  the  vine  has  from  the  vintager  or 
a  ship  from  its  builder.  This  was  of  course  utterly 
to  misconceive  Origen,  who  had  taught  clearly  enough 
that  as  begotten  by  the  Father  the  Sou  is  absolutely 
separate  from  all  creatures.  Complaint  was  promptly 
made  by  the  orthodox  to  Dionysius  of  Eome ;  tlie  eternity 
of  the  Son  had  been  denied,  and  suspicion  cast  upon 
His  unity  of  essence  with  the  Father.  Thus  they  pled 
the  doctrine  of  Origen  against  his  erring  follower. 

The  bishop  of  Kome  dealt  with  the  matter  on  the 
lines  of  Tertullian  and  Novatian.  He  urged  that  in  zeal 
for  the  three  distinctions  in  the  Godhead  the  unity  must 
not  be  overlooked.  Tritheism  is  the  deadliest  of  foes. 
Hence,  appealing  to  the  Baptismal  Creed,  he  was  content 
to  say  that  faith  accepts  tlie  being  of  one  God,  the 
Almighty  Father,  of  Christ  Jesus  His  Son,  and  of  the 
Holy  Spirit.  In  particular,  the  Logos  must  have  been 
ever   in  the  Father,  for  He  is  no   product  of  time,  not 


THE    DIUNYSII  171 

having  been  made,  but  begotten  in  a  Divine  and  ineffable 
manner.  The  Eoman  bishop  appears  even  to  have  laid 
stress  upon  the  term  6fioov(jio<;,  and  Seeberg  points  out 
that  this  is  the  first  occasion  upon  which  the  historic 
adjective  figures  as  a  definitely  orthodox  expression.^ 
The  tone  of  his  answer  to  the  Eastern  complaint  is 
judicial,  not  speculative,  as  was  natural  in  a  man  not 
attempting  originality,  but  seeking  a  wise  and  tested  via 
media.  Dionysius  of  Alexandria,  protesting  meanwhile 
that  some  of  his  expressions  had  been  misconstrued, 
showed  himself  very  ready  to  make  amends.  It  was  true, 
he  said,  that  no  time  had  ever  been  when  God  had  not 
been  Father ;  the  Son,  as  the  radiance  of  Eternal  Light, 
was  Himself  eternal.  To  say,  however,  that  he  rejected 
the  homousia  was  false,  though  he  had  felt  a  delicacy  in 
using  a  term  not  to  be  found  in  Scripture.  Thus  the 
correspondence  ended,  with  apparent  agreement  on  all 
hands  as  to  the  unity  of  essence.  "What  is  mainly  of 
interest  to  the  modern  student  is  to  observe  how  one 
part  of  Origen's  system  has  already  begun  to  be  set  in 
opposition  to  another,  and  also  to  note  how  practically- 
minded  Eome,  clinging  to  the  Creed,  and  deprecating 
additions  to  it,  stands  in  uneasy  contrast  to  the  Eastern 
love  of  speculation. 

§  4.  Paul  of  Samosata. — A  few  years  after  the  death 
of  Origen,  theological  attention  was  drawn  sharply  to  the 
opinions  of  Paul  of  Samosata,  the  ablest  expositor  in  the 
ancient  Church  of  Dynamic  Monarchianism.  Paul  was 
bishop  of  Antioch  from  20 0  to  269.  With  considerable 
knowledge  of  the  world  he  combined  striking  gifts  of 
exposition,  and  could  hold  unfriendly  synods  at  bay  by 
the  sheer  skill  of  his  dialectic.  Starting  with  a  purely  Old 
Testament  idea  of  God,  he  tauglit  that  in  the  man  Jesus 
there  dwelt  the  Divine  Sophia  or  Logos.  But  the  Logos 
is  no  personal  subsistence  {dvv7r6(rTaTo<i) ;  it  is  simply  the 
Spirit  of  God,  and  exists  in  the  Deity  as  a  man's  reason 
1  Op.  cit.  i.  468. 


172  THE    PERSON    OF    JESUS    CHRIST 

does  in  himself,  and  this  essential  impersonality  renders 
it  unthinkable  that  it  should  manifest  itself  personally 
in  a  human  life.  It  is  present  in  Christ,  therefore, 
only  as  a  power  or  influence,  like  the  indwelling  of 
wisdom  in  the  prophets.  What  is  unique  in  Jesus  is  the 
inhabitation  of  the  Logos  sensu  eminenti ;  the  man  is  as 
a  temple  for  the  higher  presence.  Thus  the  historic  Jesus 
while  superior  to  other  men  in  all  things,  is  strictly 
"  from  beneath  "  (Xpicrro?  KaTwOev)  ;  Mary  bore  a  man  our 
equal,  who  is  the  only  personal  subject  in  the  case,  and 
whose  existence  began  at  the  nativity.  But  the  Logos 
from  above  inspired  Him,  and  wrought  in  Him  as  a  quality, 
though  not  in  essential  or  personal  form  {ovk  ovcnMhw<i 
aXka  Kara  TroioTrjra).  Apparently  Paul  made  a  good 
deal  of  the  Baptism,  as  marking  the  point  at  which  the 
Logos  was  communicated.  Thus  endowed,  Jesus  kept  Him- 
self by  obedience  in  the  love  of  God.  Between  God  and 
Jesus,  as  two  distinct  persons,  there  subsisted  a  relation- 
ship of  perfect  unity  in  disposition,  based  on  perfect  love, 
a  bond  which  is  best  described  as  ethical,  not  natural,  since 
it  is  constituted  by  mutual  knowledge  and  communion 
between  a  Father  only  in  heaven  and  a  Son  only  on  earth. 
Finally,  in  virtue  of  His  transcendent  merit,  Jesus  attained 
to  such  a  permanent  union  with  God  as  qualifies  Him  to 
be  Saviour,  and  confers  upon  Him  the  name  that  is  above 
every  name.^  Subsequently  to  death  and  resurrection 
He  was  invested  with  Divine  power,  and  may  fitly  be 
designated  "  God  (born)  of  the  Virgin."  As  Harnack 
expresses  it,  "  He  became  God  through  Divine  grace  and 
His  constant  manifestation  of  goodness."  ^ 

Clearly  enough  this  scheme  has  some  connection  with 
Origen,  though  whether  of  misinterpretation  or  revolt  is  not 
so  easy  to  say.  Origen  too  had  said  much  of  the  ethical 
development  of  the  man  Jesus,  and  of  His  possession  of 
the  Logos.  Yet  the  difference  is  obvious  that  to  Origen 
the  Logos  existed  hypostatically  before  all  time,  while  for 

^  Paul  was  fond  of  arguing  from  Ph  2^'^^. 
"  History  of  Dogma,  iii.  43. 


PAUL    OF    SAMOSATA  173 

Paul  the  hypostatic  factor  is  puicly  liuman.  Curiously, 
although  Seeberg  calls  him  tlie  first  Unitarian,  and 
declares  that  he  is  the  only  thinker  among  dynamic 
Monarchians  whom  the  name  really  fits,  Paul  nevertheless 
persisted,  with  whatever  inconsistency,  in  speaking  of  the 
Godhead  of  Christ,  and  this  after  he  had  stopped  the 
singing  of  hymns  in  public  worship  which  affirmed  Christ's 
essential  divinity. 

Harnack  praises  Paul  warmly,  almost  as  if  he  were 
an  early  Piitschlian  of  the  left  wing.  Thus,  for  example  : 
"  Paul's  expositions  of  nature  and  will  in  the  Persons,  of 
the  essence  and  power  of  love,  of  the  Divinity  of  Christ, 
as  only  perceptible  in  the  work  of  His  ministry,  because 
exclusively  constituted  by  unity  of  will  with  God,  are 
almost  unparalleled  in  the  whole  dogmatic  literature  of 
the  Oriental  Churches  in  the  first  three  centuries."  ^  He 
also  commends  him  for  having  fixed  upon  Jesus'  will,  not 
His  nature,  as  the  element  of  Divine  uniqueness,  and  in 
general  for  his  refusal  to  plunge  into  speculation.  The 
authenticity  of  the  fragments  on  which  Harnack  bases 
part  of  this  eulogy  has  been  questioned ;  but  in  any  case 
we  may  well  permit  the  Samosatene  to  remind  us  that 
a  mere  opposition  between  will  and  nature  is  unsound. 
Nature  certainly  may  mean  "  substance,"  and  on  that 
understanding  it  is  obviously  a  category  unequal  to  the 
task  of  interpreting  supremely  personal  and  spiritual 
realities,  so  that  Paul's  protest  will  seem  in  place  as  a 
warning  that  "  nature "  can  only  be  usefully  employed  to 
mean  the  whole  personal  being,  whether  of  God  or  man,  as 
a  living  unity  of  knowing,  feeling,  and  will.  Beyond  this 
terminological  concession,  however,  we  cannot  go.  If  we 
have  to  choose  between  a  Saviour  who  was  God  by  original 
and  inherent  life,  and  one  who,  as  now  suggested,  became  '^ 
God,  we  shall  scarcely  hesitate.  The  conception  of  a 
Godhead   which    came    to   be,   although    not  unknown   in 

^  Hidory  of  Dogma,  iii.  44. 

*  iiffrepov    avrbv    ixtra    T-qv     ivavOpiLTf/jaLv     Ik     TrpOKOTrrjs    reOeoTroirjcrdai. 
Athanasiiis,  de  Cogn.  26.  45. 


174  THE   PERSON    OF    JESUS    CHRIST 

nineteenth-century  thought,  is  sheer  mythology.  It  is 
simply  a  mistaken  expression  of  the  perfectly  legitimate 
demand  that  the  human  aspect  of  Christ  must  not  be 
sacrificed  or  suppressed. 

It  is  interesting  to  observe  that  the  Council  which 
condemned  Paul,  in  268  or  269,  explicitly  censured  the 
term  ofioovcno'i.  This  was  done,  according  to  Athanasius, 
because  Paul  had  contended  that  if  Christ  is  6/jLoouaio<i 
with  the  Father,  their  two  identical  ovalat  must  be 
derived  from  a  still  higher  ova-la,  as  the  ultimate  source 
or  fount  of  Deity,  which  would  imply  that  in  reality 
three  ovaiai  exist.  But  Hilary's  account  is  much  more 
probable.  The  word  was  rejected,  he  says,  because  Paul 
had  used  it  to  cover  his  doctrine  of  the  impersonality 
of  the  Logos.  For  as  yet  ovala  and  uTrocrTacrt?  were 
synonyms  ;  and  the  assertion  of  one  essence  was  taken 
to  imply  one  personality.  Henceforth  no  Christology 
could  hope  for  a  hearing  which  did  not  make  room  for 
the  hypostatic  pre  existence  of  Christ,  and  affirm  His 
divinity  as  eternal  in  the  past  no  less  than  in  the 
future. 


CHAPTER   IV. 

THE  ARIAN  CONTROVERSY. 

§  1.  The  Heresy  of  Arius. — Before  the  commencement 
of  the  Arian  strife,  the  Church  appeared  to  have  reached 
three  fixed  truths  respecting  the  Lord's  person,  as  the 
fruit  of  previous  controversies.  These  points  were  (a) 
the  Son's  unity  of  essence  with  the  Father;  (b)  His 
eternal  generation ;  (c)  His  personal  distinction  from  the 
Father.  Suddenly,  however,  new  conflicts  broke  out  round 
the  first  and  second  of  these,  and  raged  for  near  a 
century. 

Arius,  through  whose  intervention  the  question  became 
acute,  was  a  presbyter  of  Alexandria,  of  whose  birth  and 
early  life  we  know  nothing.  One  of  the  churches  of  the 
city  was  under  his  care,  and  he  appears  to  have  discharged 
his  responsibilities  with  exemplary  diligence  and  piety. 
Of  ascetic  aspect  and  winning  manners  (so  it  is  said), 
bis  faults  were  vanity  and  ambition.  Nevertheless,  albeit 
the  most  detested  heretic  in  history,  it  seems  likely 
enough  that  when  in  advanced  years  he  began  to  urge 
his  peculiar  theories,  it  was  without  any  clear  conscious- 
ness that  he  was  deserting  from  the  traditional  view  of 
the  Church. 

Previous  to  his  residence  in  Alexandria,  Arius  sat  at 

Literature — Gwatkin,  Studies  of  Arianism,  1882  ;  Newman,  The 
Arians  of  the  Fourth  Century"^,  1854  ;  Loofs,  articles  "  Arianismus,"  RE. 
ii.,  "  Christologie,"  RE.  iv.,  and  "  Kenosis,"  RE.  x.  ;  Schultz,  Die  Lehre 
von  der  Gottheit  Christi,  1881  ;  Gore,  Dissertations,  1895  ;  Voigt,  Die 
Lehre  des  Athanasius,  1881  ;  Rainy,  The  Ancient  Catholic  Church,  1902  ; 
Zahn,  Marcellus  von  Ancyra,  1867  ;  Curtis,  History  of  Creeds  and 
Confessions  of  Faith,  1911  ;  Mobeily,  Atonement  and  Personality/,  1901. 

176 


176  THE    PERSON    OF   JESUS    CHRIST 

the  feet  of  Lucian  of  Antioch,  a  contemporary  and 
follower  of  Paul  of  Saraosata,  who  had  fallen  out  of 
Church  fellowship,  but  presided  over  a  famous  exegetical 
school.  Lucian  had  made  certain  modifications  in  Paul's 
Christology,  which  Arius  took  over  from  his  teacher. 
They  involved  an  approximation  to  the  left  wing  of 
the  Origenistic  school,  a  representative  of  which  we  have 
already  encountered  in  Dionysius  of  Alexandria.  For 
the  most  part  Arius  only  repeated  the  views  of  Lucian. 
The  occasion  of  the  decisive  outbreak,  according  to  the 
historian  Socrates  (i.  5),  was  a  doctrinal  address  given 
to  his  presbyters  by  Alexander,  bishop  of  Alexandria, 
probably  in  the  year  318.  Thus  the  controversy  was 
Eastern  in  origin.  In  the  West,  owing  to  the  influence 
of  writers  like  TertuUian,  the  mind  of  the  Church  had 
been  satisfied  with  formulas  which  combined  the  deity  of 
Christ  with  the  oneness  of  the  Godhead.  So  Dionysius 
of  Kome  had  insisted  on  the  homousia,  going  back  to 
the  una  substantia  of  TertuUian.  Prior  to  the  con- 
troversy, therefore,  the  West  had  virtually  pronounced 
judgment. 

Arius  sets  out  from  a  baldly  transcendent  monotheism.^ 
God  is  abstractly  perfect  and  infinite,  one  and  unbegotten, 
which  means  that  the  idea  of  a  Divine  emanation  or 
7rpo/3o\r;  cannot  be  entertained  ;  "  the  unity  of  God,"  in 
short,  "  excludes  not  only  distinctions  inside  the  Divine 
nature,  but  also  contact  with  the  world."  ^  Hence  the 
Son,  although  pre-existent,  is  not  unbegotten ;  for  any- 
thing else  would  make  the  Father  composite  and  divisible, 
and  the  second  "  unbegotten "  were  Brother  of  the 
first.  Accordingly  the  Son  had  a  beginning.  Before  all 
time  He  came  into  existence,  out  of  nothing,  by  God's 
will,  His  primary  function  being  that  of  mediator  of 
creation.  So  that  He  is  a  creature,  even  if  the  first  of 
creatures,  as  is  proved  by  Pr   S-^*-.     Before  His  generation 

1  So  much  is  God  a  mystery  that  Arius  says  He  is  inscrutable  to  His 
own  Son. 

2  Gwatkin,  The  Arian  Controversy,  6. 


CHRISTOLOGY    OF    ARIUS  177 

or  production  He  was  not.  "  G(xl  was  not  Father  eternally  ; 
on  the  contrary,  there  was  a  time  when  God  was  alone,  and 
was  not  as  yet  Father,  though  later  He  became  Father. 
The  Son  did  not  exist  eternally  ;  for,  all  things  having  come 
to  be  out  of  that  which  was  not  .  .  .  the  Logos  of  God 
also  Himself  originated  out  of  things  that  were  not  (ef  ovk 
6vT0)v),  there  was  once  when  He  was  not,  and  He  was  not 
prior  to  His  becoming  (fjv  irore  ore  ovk  rjv,  kuI  ovk  r/v 
irplv  ryevTjrai)."  ^  This  means,  of  course,  that  there  is  no 
identity  of  essence  between  the  Father  and  the  Sou  {^evo<i 
Tov  vlov  Kar'  ovaiav  6  iraji'^p).  There  is  indeed  a  Logos 
immanent  in  God,  but  it  is  not  the  Son ;  and  the  Son, 
like  all  other  creaturely  beings,  participates  in  this 
inherent  Logos,  and  is  Himself  named  Logos  only  by  way 
of  grace.  Arius  was  willing  to  call  Christ  "  God "  on 
occasion,  and  in  fact  went  so  far  as  to  employ  the 
orthodox  -  sounding  phrase,  "  fully  God,  only  -  begotten, 
immutable."  ^  But  this  was  an  evasion,  as  he  virtually 
concedes  in  the  more  popular  Thalia :  ^  "  Even  if  He  be 
styled  God,  yet  is  He  not  true  God,  but  only  by  the 
participation  of  grace,  even  as  all  others."  At  this  point 
a  startling  corollary  comes  into  view.  If  the  Logos  is 
not  unbegotten,  neither  is  He  immutable.  "  The  Logos 
Himself  is  changeable  (T/oeTrro?) ;  it  is  by  His  own  choice 
that  He  remains  good,  so  long  as  He  will ;  but  when  He 
wishes,  even  He  can  change,  just  as  we  can."  God, 
knowing  in  advance  that  He  would  be  perfect,  gave  Him 
anticipatively  the  glory  won  by  His  human  virtue.  Such 
things  had  been  said  before,  by  Paul  of  Samosata, 
regarding  the  historic  Christ ;  but  it  is  noteworthy  that 
Arius,  following  Lucian,  affirmed  them  definitely  of  the 
pre-temporal  Logos,  possibly  influenced  by  his  belief  that 
Christ  had  no  human  soul,  its  place  being  taken  directly 
by  the  Logos. 

Schultz  has  pronounced  the  Arian  theory  of  the  Lord's 

^  TTial.  in  Athan.  Or.  c.  Ar.  i.  5. 

2  In  his  Epistle  to  Eusebiiis  of  Nicomedia. 

*  A  collection  of  songs  "  for  sailors  and  millers  and  wayfarers." 

13 


178  THE    PERSON    OF   JESUS    CHRIST 

person  to  be  "  inwardly  the  least  stable  and  dogmatically 
the  most  worthless  of  all  the  Christologies  to  be  met 
with  in  history."^  Few  will  question  the  justice  of 
this  verdict.  For  Arianism  introduced  a  mythological 
element  into  Christianity,  strangely  reminiscent  of  the 
heroes  and  demigods  of  pagan  legend.  Proofs,  no  doubt, 
might  have  been  quoted  as  to  this  or  that  point  from 
older  writers,  for  both  the  Apologists  and  Tertullian  had 
taught  that  the  Son  had  a  beginning  in  time;  but  there 
is  a  difference  between  the  casual  phrases  of  pioneer 
exploration  and  the  clear-cut  terminology  of  deliberate 
system.  The  completeness  with  which  Arius  missed  his 
mark  is  one  of  the  ironies  of  history.  Starting  with  a 
desire  to  clear  the  worship  of  Christ  from  a  charge  of 
polytheism,  he  led  the  way  straight  back  to  heathen 
idolatry.  After  proclaiming  that  Christ's  humanity  is 
fundamental,  he  ended  by  denying  Him  a  human  soul. 
Above  all,  he  made  it  fatally  certain  that  on  his  terms 
our  Lord  is  no  true  mediator,  no  daysman  "  who  can  lay  a 
hand  upon  us  both."  God  stands  outside  the  world,  and 
the  chasm  cannot  be  bridged.  The  Church  refused,  on 
purely  religious  grounds,  to  be  put  off  with  a  Saviour 
who  turned  out  on  examination  to  be  only  an  inferior 
cosmological  principle.  And  from  the  first  it  was  an 
ominous  characteristic  of  Arianism  that  it  strove  to  render 
the  Gospel  into  the  terms  of  common  sense,  and  took 
pride  in  having  so  banished  all  mystery  that  the  problems 
of  Christology  are  child's  play  to  any  fairly  intelligent 
outsider. 

Our  business  is  with  the  progress  of  doctrine,  not  the 
struggles  of  parties,  and  we  cannot  follow  the  windings 
of  the  sixty  years  of  controversy.  Yet  it  should  be  said 
that  Arius  pled  his  case  before  the  world  with  singular 
political  dexterity.  His  influence  was  not  confined  to 
Alexandria.  Bishops  and  virgins  of  Egypt  favoured  him, 
and  he  had  champions  among  the  episcopate  of  Palestine 
and  Syria.  Shallow  and  thoughtful  men  alike  were 
1  Gottheit  Christi,  65. 


THE    NICENE    CREED  179 

attracted  by  his  views,  at  least  to  begin  with  ;  but 
most  of  all  he  was  assisted  by  the  prevailing  fear  of 
Sabellianism.  It  was  only  after  an  immense  expendi- 
ture of  intellectual  and  ethical  resources  that  the  Church 
as  a  whole  was  brought  to  see  how  the  specious  simplicity 
of  his  theories  was  totally  subversive  of  the  fundamental 
realities  of  the  Christian  faith. 

§  2.  The  Nicene  Creed.  —  The  first  to  stamp  the 
doctrine  of  Arius  with  churchly  disapproval  was  his 
bishop,  Alexander.  Probably  in  321,  he  passed  sentence 
of  excommunication  on  the  leader  and  a  few  of  his  chief 
followers.  Alexander's  own  statements  on  Chrislology  are 
opaque,  and  not  devoid  of  superficial  contradictions,  but 
his  drift  is  quite  clearly  to  maintain  the  essential  unity 
of  Father  and  Son,  and  the  inherent  divinity  of  the 
Eedeemer  Christ.  To  Arius  he  replied  that  if  Christ  is 
the  effulgence  of  the  Father's  glory,  to  deny  His  eternity 
is  to  deny  that  in  God  there  is  light  eternal.  God,  as 
such,  is  Father,  and  this  He  cannot  be  without  a  Son. 
On  the  other  hand,  Alexander  holds  that  the  Son  is 
generate  of  the  Father,  though  in  no  material  sense  or  by 
way  of  actual  division.  At  the  same  time,  as  an  Origenist 
of  the  right  wing  he  can  speak  of  the  Logos  as  "  a  mediat- 
ing only-begotten  nature,"  ^  set  between  the  unoriginate 
Father  and  created  things,  and  his  distaste  for  Sabellian- 
ism manifests  itself  in  the  phrase  that  the  two  natures  in 
the  Divine  substance  were  not  one,  but  like  in  all  points. 
It  is  even  explained  that  the  Father,  who  alone  is  un- 
begotten,  is  anterior  to,  as  well  as  greater  than,  Christ ; 
on  which  Harnack  well  remarks  that  evidently  "  the  real 
point  in  dispute  [with  Arius]  was  not  as  to  subordination 
and  co-ordination,  but  as  to  unity  of  substance  and 
difference  of  substance."  ^  But  an  irreconcilable  hostility 
to  Arius'  doctrine  is  expressed  in  his  insistent  claim  that 
the  resemblance  of  the  Son  to  the  Father  is  an  essential 

*  History  of  Dogma,  vol.  iv.  23. 


180  THE    PERSON    OF    JESUS    CHRIST 

one.      If  the  Ariaus  suspected  Alexander  of  Sabellianism, 
his  phrases  were  more  to  blame  than  his  ideas. 

By  this  time  Constantine  had  become  aware  of  the 
dispute.  Perceiving  how  detrimental  bitter  controversy- 
must  be  to  the  unity  of  his  empire,  he  resolved  to  bring 
it  to  an  end,  and  summoned  all  Christian  bishops  to 
assemble  at  Nictea  in  Bithynia  (325).  It  was  the  first 
ecumenical  Council,  and  something  like  300  bishops 
attended,  mostly  from  the  East.  Two  presbyters  came 
from  Eome,  and  Hosius  of  Cordova  was  the  Spanish 
deputy.  In  the  Council  itself  we  can  distinguish  three 
parties,  shading  off  into  each  other — the  Arians,  led  by 
Eusebius  of  Nicomedia,  and  comparatively  few  in  number ; 
a  still  smaller  group  who  sided  with  Alexander  by  convic- 
tion ;  and  between  these,  the  great  majority  of  the  bishops, 
either  too  indifferent  to  theology  to  appreciate  the  issue, 
or  disposed  by  conservatism  to  rest  content  with  Origen 
as  usually  interpreted.  Of  this  middle  party  the  spokes- 
man was  Eusebius  of  Ctesarea,  by  far  the  most  learned 
member  of  the  Council. 

First  of  all  the  Arians  presented  a  creed  shaped 
to  their  mind,  only  to  see  it  torn  fiercely  in  fragments. 
On  this  Eusebius  of  Ceesarea  brought  forward  the 
baptismal  creed  of  his  own  church,  "  a  short  and  simple 
document,  admirably  recommended  to  conservative  feeling 
by  its  scriptural  language  and  prudent  evasions  of  the 
question  before  the  Council."^  It  was  Origenist  in 
general  type,  speaking  of  Christ  as  the  Logos  of  God, 
"the  first-born  of  all  creation,  begotten  of  the  Father 
before  all  ages,"  and,  in  short,  had  the  good  and  bad 
features  of  a  compromise.  The  bulk  of  those  present 
would  have  accepted  it  without  discussion  ;  but  men  like 
Athanasius  and  Marcellus  of  Ancyra,  who  realised  the 
danger,  were  resolved  not  to  be  put  off  with  ambiguities. 
They  felt  that  phrases  like  "first-born  of  all  creation" 
gave  a  loop-hole  to  Arianism,  and  that  the  mere  statement 
that  the  Son  "  was  made  flesh  "  affirmed  nothing  vital  as  to 
^  Gwatkiu,  Studies  of  Arianism,  39. 


THE    NICENE    CREED  181 

His  possession  of  a  true  human  soul.  Possibly  in  the 
end  it  was  Hosius  of  Cordova  who  urged  the  Emperor 
to  include  the  piegnant  w'ords  ofxoovaio'i  tw  iraTpi,  as 
a  bulwark  against  equivocation.  Hosius,  as  a  Western, 
may  have  overlooked  the  diflticulties  in  the  phrase  of 
which  the  Easterns  were  conscious,  and  wliich  had  led 
them,  fifty  yeais  before,  to  reject  it  in  their  con- 
demnation of  Pavd  of  Samosata.  Further,  6fio(ivaLo<i 
agrees  with  the  "Western  tradition  as  stated  by  Tertulliau. 
Once  the  Emperor  had  indicated  his  approval,  nothing 
remained  for  the  majority  but  to  submit ;  and  ultimately 
the  creed  of  Eusebius  was  remodelled  in  a  spirit  of  stern 
and  resolute  opposition  to  all  Arianising  views.  The  text, 
as  passed  with  virtual  unanimity,  is  as  follows  : — 

Uiarevo^ev  el<i  era  Oeov  Trarepa  rrainoKpciTopa, 
TTLLVTOiv  oparwv  T€  Kdi  aopciTMv.  Kal  et?  eva  Kvpiov 
^Itjctovp  Xpiarbv  rov  viov  rov  deov,  fyevvrjOevra  €k  tov 
varpo^  /jLOVoyevi],  Tovreariv  eV  t/}?  overlap  tov  Trarpo^, 
Oeov  €K  deov,  ^w?  ere  <^&>to?,  6eov  u\r]6ii'ov  e'/c  6eov  dXrjOivov, 
yevvTjOevTa,  ov  7roir]6evTa,  ojxoovaLov  tm  iraTpi,  8c  ov  to.  irdvTa 
iyepero,  rd  re  eV  tm  ovpavw  Kal  Ta  ev  rfj  yfj  •  tov  8t'  '>)/J.a<; 
Tov<i  dvOpcoTroVs  Kal  hid  t^iv  ij/xeTepav  acoTrjplav  KUTeXOovTa 
Kal  (xapKO)devTa,  evavOpoiiri^aavTa,  iraOovTa,  Kal  dvacTTavTa 
TTJ  Tpirr)  yfiepa,  dveXOovTU  e/9  ovpavovi,  Kal  ep'^o/xevov 
Kptvai  ^(i)VTa<i  Kal  veKpov^,  Kat  et?  to  dyiov  irvev/xa. 
Tov<;  Be  XejovTa<i  '  rjv  Trore  OTe  ovk  rjv,  Kal  irplv 
yevvrjdrjvai  ovk  r/v,  Kal  otl  e^  ovk  ovTOiv  eyeveTO,  rj  i^  eTepa^ 
VTrocrTciaeo)^  i)  ovaia^  (j)ciaKOVTa<;  elvai,  1)  KTtaTov  i)  TpeiTTOv 
*]  dWoiMTOv  TOV  VIOV  TOV  Oeou,  dvade/xaTL^ei  rj  KadoXiKr] 
eKKXrjaui.^ 

^  "We  believe  in  one  God  the  Father  Almiglity,  Maker  of  all  things 
both  visible  and  invisible.  And  in  one  Lord  Jesus  Christ  the  Son  of  God, 
begotten  of  the  Father,  only-begotten,  that  is,  of  the  substance  of  the 
Father,  God  of  God,  Light  of  Light,  true  God  of  true  God,  begotten  not 
made,  of  one  substance  with  the  Father  (homoousion) ;  through  whom 
all  things  were  made,  both  things  in  heaven  and  things  on  earth  ;  who 
for  us  men  and  for  our  salvation  carae  down  and  was  made  flesh,  was  made 
man,  sufl'ered,  and  rose  again  the  third  day,  ascended  into  the  heavens, 
and  Cometh  to  judge  quick  and  dead.     And  in  the  Holy  Spirit.     But  those 


182  THE  PERSON   OE  JESuS   CHRIST 

The  main  desire  of  those  who  framed  this  creed  was 
obviously,  as  has  been  remarked,  to  exclude  Arianism. 
At  all  costs  it  must  be  affirmed  that  the  Son  is  not  a 
creature,  and  that  He  is  of  one  essence  with  the  Father. 
This  explains  the  alterations  introduced  into  the  Eusebian 
Creed,  of  which  a  brief  account  may  be  given.  To  begin 
with,  Christ  is  designated,  not  as  Logos,  but  as  Son ;  and 
the  two  phrases,  "  the  first-born  of  all  creation  "  and  "  be- 
gotten of  the  Father  before  all  ages,"  are  dropped.  Arians 
could  have  accepted  both.  Next,  there  are  additions 
pointing  in  the  same  direction :  (1)  "  only-begotten  "  has 
attached  to  it  the  explanatory  clause,  "  that  is,  from  the 
essence  of  the  Father";  (2)  two  phrases  are  inserted, 
"  begotten,  not  made,"  and  the  famous  "  of  one  essence 
with  the  Father " ;  (3)  the  creed  ends  with  unmistakable 
anathemas.  According  to  these  decisions,  the  Divine  Son- 
ship  of  Christ  is  set  forth  as  no  accident  of  time,  but  an 
eternal,  and,  as  it  were,  organic  relation  within  the  Godhead. 
The  distinction  between  Father  and  Son  and  their  unity 
are  equally  stated  and  balanced  over-against  each  other 
by  the  two  phrases  "  from  the  essence  "  (distinction)  and 
"  of  one  essence  "  (unity).  Finally,  by  adding  "  was  made 
man  "  to  "  was  made  flesh,"  the  Arian  tenet  that  Christ  had  a 
real  body,  but  no  human  soul,  was  definitiv^ely  barred  out ; 
the  Council,  with  remarkable  self-restraint,  laying  down  no 
other  finding  as  to  the  constitution  of  the  theanthropic 
person.  Two  curious  facts  are  worth  mention,  as  indicat- 
ing that  the  Council  had  no  leaning  to  Origen,  and  was 
more  concerned  to  insist  on  the  unity  of  Father  and  Son 
than  the  distinction.  In  the  first  place,  there  is  no 
reference  to  "  eternal  generation " ;  in  the  second,  the 
anathemas  employ  vTroaTaai^  and  ovaia  as  synonyms. 
The  latter  usage  almost  entitles  a  thinker  like  Marcellus 


who  say  that  'there  was  ouce  when  He  was  not,'  and  'before  being  be- 
gotten He  was  not,'  and  '  He  came  to  be  of  things  that  were  not,'  or  contend 
that  the  Son  of  God  is  of  a  different  substance  or  essence,  or  created,  or 
(morally)  alterable  or  mutable — these  doth  the  Catholic  Church  anathematize." 
For  the  Greek  text,  see  Halm,  §  142. 


ATHANASIUS  183 

of  Ancyra  to  read  6fj,oovaio<i  in  a  Sabellian  sense.  The 
Sabelliau  associatious  of  the  word,  at  all  events,  are  the 
most  natural  explanation  of  Athanasius'  long  reluctance 
to  adopt  it. 

In  the  end  only  a  few  refused  to  sign ;  some  perhaps, 
like  Eusebius  of  Nicomedia,  subscribing  their  names  with 
secret  reservations;  others  feeling,  in  their  own  bitter 
phrase,  that  "  the  soul  is  none  the  worse  for  a  little  ink." 
In  point  of  fact,  the  views  of  Athanasius  had  been  forced 
on  half-convinced  men,  and  reaction  came  inevitably,  with 
the  result  that  the  Council  of  Nica?a  opened  a  new  stage 
in  the  controversy  it  was  designed  to  close.  This  brings 
us  to  the  man  who  now  fouglit  for  truth  in  the  front  rank, 
and  through  whose  instrumentality  the  Church  was  enabled 
to  keep  the  faith. 

§  3.  Athanasius. — Athanasius  (c.  297-373)  comes 
into  view  at  the  Council  of  Xica?a,  to  which  he  accom- 
panied his  bishop,  Alexander.  Probably  a  native  of 
Alexandria,  and  doubtless  trained  in  the  grammar,  logic, 
and  rhetoric  of  the  time,  he  appears  early  to  have  won  the 
regard  of  the  bishop,  who  employed  him  as  his  secretary. 
By  the  opening  of  the  Arian  controversy  he  was  deacon, 
and  in  326  succeeded  Alexander  in  the  bishop's  chair. 
Although  technically  ineligible,  he  is  considered  on  good 
grounds  to  have  played  a  leading  part  in  the  Nicene 
debates.  Though  not  erudite  like  Origen,  he  exhibits  a 
clear  and  disciplined  intelligence,  as  well  as  a  searching 
religious  power,  and  a  courageous  loftiness  of  spiritual 
temper,  which  make  his  vast  influence  no  mystery.  States- 
man, saint,  thinker,  he  gave  his  life  as  a  long  sacrifice  for 
truth,  with  hardly  one  lapse  from  consistent  greatness. 

His  fundamental  ideas  may  be  gathered  from  his  tract, 
On  the  Incarnation  of  the  Word  of  God,  written  before  Arius 
had  broached  the  new  theory.  Its  leading  thought  is  that 
God  Himself  has  entered  human  history.  Through  the  fall 
sin  had  invaded  earth,  bringing  upon  guilty  man  the  fate  of 
corruption  and  mortality.     A  higher  power  must  interpose, 


184  THE    PERSON    OF    JESUS    CHRIST 

since  repentance  on  man's  part  would  have  been  insufficient 
remedy ;  and  hence  in  His  infinite  love  God  did  the  wonder 
of  wonders.  "  The  immortal  Word  took  human  flesh,  and 
gave  His  mortal  body  for  us  all."  ^  He  wrought  deliverance 
by  receiving  the  principle  of  death  into  Himself,  so  x>er- 
mitting  it  to  wreak  all  its  might  and  terror  on  His  nature, 
and  annulling  its  power  for  all  who  are  one  with  life 
in  Him.  By  resurrection  He  vanquished  the  powers  of 
corruption  for  ever,  in  a  triumph  which  is  the  surety  of 
our  glorious  return  to  God.  To  use  the  very  words 
of  Athanasius,  "He  was  made  man  that  we  might  be 
made  God."  2 

His  piercing  criticisms  of  the  Arian  doctrine  are  only 
an  application  of  these  principles,  from  which  he  never 
swerved.^  Arius,  he  said,  taught  pure  polytheism  ;  for  if 
the  Father  is  not  Father  everlastingly,  and  if  in  time  a  Son 
emerges,  as  the  finite  progeny  of  Godhead,  and  afterwards 
a  Spirit  lower  still,  who  can  answer  for  it  that  this  is  the 
end  ?  Only  if  the  Sou  is  identical  in  nature  and  essence 
with  the  Father  is  it  possible  to  speak  of  the  Divine  unity, 
and  that  this  is  the  Son's  true  place  is  settled  by  the  fact 
that  Christians  pray  to  Him.  Again,  the  theory  of  Arius 
takes  all  certainty  out  of  salvation.  For  how  can  it  be 
certain  if  the  Logos  is  morally  alterable ;  how  in  that  case 
can  we  see  the  unchanging  Father  in  the  Son,  or  regard  the 
Son  as  the  Father's  image  ?  In  short,  given  the  Arian  view 
of  Christ,  it  is  idle  to  talk  of  our  attaining  to  real  union 
with  God,  or  the  forgiveness  of  sins,  or  immortality.  If  the 
Son  has  a  created  nature,  His  becoming  man  leaves  us  still 
at  a  distance  from  God,  for  no  one  who  is  a  creature  like 
ourselves  could  raise  us  to  oneness  with  the  Creator.  He 
could  never  give  us  what  He  had  not  for  Himself.  A  God- 
head not  original,  but  derived,  could  not  be  passed  on  to 

^  Gwatkin,  Arian  Controversy,  10. 

2  On  the  rendering  "God,"  rather  than  "gods,"  see  Robertson's  note, 
p.  54  of  his  translation  of  Athanasius  {Niccne  and  Fost-Nicene  Fathers, 
vol.  iv.). 

*  Of.  Seeberg,  Dogmengcschichte  (Ite  Aufl.),  162  f. 


HIS    CRITICISM    OF    ARIUS  185 

others.  Accordingly,  "  He  had  not  promotion  from  His 
descent,  but  rather  Himself  promoted  the  things  which 
needed  promotion ;  and  if  He  descended  to  effect  their 
promotion,  therefore  He  did  not  receive  in  reward  the  name 
of  the  Son  and  God,  but  rather  He  Himself  has  made  us 
sons  of  the  Father,  and  deified  men  by  becoming  Himself 
man.  Therefore  He  was  not  man,  and  then  became  God, 
but  He  was  God,  and  then  became  man,  and  that  to  deify 
us."  ^  This  is  an  idea  which  perpetually  recurs  ;  to  partake 
of  the  Son  is  to  partake  of  God  Himself.^  And  once  more, 
the  idea  of  a  cosmological  mediator  is  superfluous.  God  is 
not  too  proud  to  touch  the  world,  and  needs  no  intermediary 
to  bring  Him  in  contact  with  finitude.  Such  a  notion  is 
immeasurably  more  unworthy  of  Him  without  whom  not 
even  a  sparrow  falls  to  the  ground,  than  a  clear  assertion  of 
His  creative  activity.  Indeed,  with  a  surprising  divergence 
into  pure  logic,  Athanasius  in  one  passage  ^  urges  that  if 
God  needs  a  mediator  to  create,  and  the  Logos  is  a  creature, 
yet  another  mediator  must  have  been  required  to  create  Him, 
and  so  on  to  infinity.  Arius  therefore  satisfies  reason  as 
little  as  he  does  religion. 

Thus,  if  Arius  held  Christ  as  part  of  the  created  world, 
Athanasius  contended  still  more  resolutely  that  His  place 
is  within  the  sphere  of  essential  Godhead.  Carefully 
maintaining  that  Divine  unity  to  which  Sabellius  had  borne 
confused  witness,  he  set  forth  the  being  of  the  Son  as 
Divine  in  the  absolute  and  eternal  sense.  "  Whatever  that 
manner  of  existence  is  which  differences  God  from  all 
creatures,  that  is  to  be  ascribed  to  the  Son  as  well  as  to 
the  Father."  *  His  is  no  mediating  nature,  as  Origen  had 
taught,  between  the  increate  and  the  created ;  "  the  Son  is 
different  in  kind  and  different  in  essence  from  things 
originate,  and  on  the  contrary  is  proper  to  the  Father's 
essence  and  one  in  nature  with  it."  ^  At  the  same  time 
His  independent  personal  being  is  secured.      What  binds 

'  Or.  c.  Ar.  i.  38-39  (Robertson's  translation). 

2  Ibid.  16.  3  2hid.  ii.  26.  *  Rainy,  o/;.  eit.  335. 

»  Or.  c.  Ar.  i.  58  ;  cf.  13. 


186  THE    PERSON    OF    JESUS    CHRIST 

Father  and  Son  together  is  unity  of  essence  {evorT]<i  t?}s 
ovaia<;);  the  Word  is  generate  from  the  essence  of  the  Father. 
Still,  at  first  Athanasius  shows  a  certain  avoidance  of  the  word 
6fioouaco<;,  which  occurs  but  once  in  the  Orationes  contra 
Arianos.  He  speaks  indeed  of  the  Son  as  "  having  with  His 
Father  the  oneness  of  Godhead  indivisible,"  ^  and  refers  to 
"  the  identity  of  the  one  Godhead  "  ^  which  Son  and  Father 
share.  He  can  even  express  his  meaning  adequately  by  the 
term  "  like,"  in  a  variety  of  combinations;  as  "  like  in  essence" 
or  "  like  in  all  things,"  And,  in  agreement  with  the  Nicene 
Creed,  he  employs  vTroaraai'i  and  ova'ia  as  synonyms. 
But  it  has  been  pointed  out  that  a  change  took  place  during 
his  second  exile,  part  of  which  was  spent  in  Eome  (339— 
346).  For  whatever  reason,  Athanasius  went  back  to 
Alexandria  a  more  convinced  advocate  of  the  term  o/xoovaio^, 
which  the  Nicene  Council,  he  remarks,  had  inserted  to  check 
the  Eusebians,  "  by  way  of  signifying  that  the  Son  was  from 
the  Father,  and  not  merely  like,  but  the  same  in  likeness."  ^ 
It  is  characteristic  of  him  that  in  such  a  case  he  would 
not  decline  the  newer  phrase.* 

The  Son,  then,  comes  forth  from  the  Father  by 
birth  or  generation  ;  and  by  generation  Athanasius  means 
simply  the  Sou's  complete  participation  in  the  whole 
essence  of  the  Father.  The  idea  of  an  efflux  or  emanation 
is  inapplicable :  "  God,  being  without  parts,  is  Father  of 
the  Son  without  partition  or  passion ;  for  there  is  neither 
effluence  of   the   Immaterial,  nor  influx  from  without,  as 

1  Or.  c.  Ar.  iv.  41.  ^  j^,/^.  iji.  4.  »  ^i^  D^cr.  20. 

■^  When  Athanasius  says  {de  Deer.  27)  that  "the  Word  is  not  of  another 
essence  or  subsistence  {i^  ir^pas  ovcrlas  ij  vvoaTdcreui),  but  proper  to  the 
Father's,"  he  is  obviously  hampered  by  having  so  far  no  settled  term  for  the 
distinctions  in  the  Godhead.  "Hypostasis"  and  "ousia"  are  used  inter- 
changeably. The  West  had  personae  for  the  three  aspects  of  Deity,  but  the 
Greek  equivalent  {irpdawwa)  was  suspect  owing  to  its  Sabellian  associations. 
This  lack  of  terminological  unanimity  and  clearness  was  extremely  awkward  ; 
and  at  times  we  can  see  that  Easterns  and  Westerns  who  felt  themselves  at 
variance  were  really  in  agreement,  but  got  to  cross-purposes  through  the 
ambiguity  of  terms,  and  especially  owing  to  the  fact  that  the  technical  words 
in  Greek  and  Latin  did  not  correspond.  Something  was  done  to  clear  up  the 
confusion  by  the  Council  of  Alexandria  in  362. 


LOGOS    REPLACED    BY    SON  187 

among  men  ;  but,  being  uncompounded  in  nature,  lie  is 
Father  of  one  Only  Son."  Again  and  again  it  is  insisted 
that  this  generation  is  not  of  the  Father's  will  (e'/c  ^ovXtjaeox;) 
but  of  His  nature,  for  the  Son  is  not  to  be  reduced  to  the 
offspring  of  arbitrary  volition.  Athanasius'  favourite  symbol 
of  the  relationship  is  the  familiar  one  of  radiance  in  its 
unity  with  the  parent  light.^  So  the  Godhead,  which  exists 
in  the  Father,  belongs  to  the  Son  also  in  the  totality  of  its 
essence ;  "  the  same  things  are  said  of  the  Son  which  are 
said  of  the  Father,  except  His  being  said  to  be  Father."  ^ 
Finally,  the  generation  is  an  eternal  one,  for  "  as  the  Father 
is  always  good  by  nature,  so  He  is  always  generative  by 
nature."  * 

An  argument  of  this  kind,  based  not  so  much  on  logic 
as  on  permanent  religious  considerations,  really  meant  that 
the  philosophical  doctrine  of  the  Logos,  as  interpretative  of 
the  Lord's  person,  had  been  replaced  by  the  conception 
of  the  Divine  Sonship.  Experience  had  proved  that  the 
term  Logos  too  easily  lent  itself  to  cosmological  theories 
with  no  bearing  on  salvation,  and  tended  to  denote  a 
mediating  Being,  essentially  distinct  from  God.  In  such 
ideas  Athanasius  could  have  no  interest.  The  Saviour 
must  be  God,  if  a  world  perishing  in  death  was  to  be 
renewed  in  Divine  immortality.  Being  very  God,  how- 
ever, and  having  put  on  human  flesh,  the  Son  became  liable 
to  suffering ;  nay  more,  He  submitted  to  be  put  to  death 
in  the  body,  that  by  His  risen  power  He  might  quicken 
all  men.  In  Him,  as  the  Second  Adam,  we  have  gained 
what  was  lost  through  the  first,  for  whatever  happened  to 
Christ's  flesh  happened  to  us  also  mystically.  Loofs  has 
justly  remarked  that  this  doctrine  of  redemption,  which 
goes  back  through  Asia  Minor  tradition  to  the  Fourth 
Gospel,  is  the  most  important  element  in  the  Athanasian 
theology.  Not  only  was  central  significance  given  thereby 
to  the  historic  Christ,  but  the  religious  interests  at  stake 
in  the  Arian  controversy  were  placed  in  their  true  light, 
and  the  ultimate  triumph  of  the  Nicene  doctrine  assured.* 
1  Cf.  Or.  c.  Jr.  iii.  4.  '-  Ibid.  »  Ibid.  iii.  67.  *  RE.  ii.  18-19. 


188  THE    PERSON    OF    JESUS    CHRIST 

Looking  back,  we  can  perceive  that  a  strongly  mono- 
theistic tendency  gave  tone  to  Athanasius'  mind,  and 
lent  irresistible  force  to  his  conflict  with  the  followers  of 
Alius.  His  unfaltering  conviction  that  the  Son  has  His 
being  within  the  one  Godhead  was  also  in  line  with 
immemorial  Christian  instincts,  and  was  expressed,  besides, 
with  such  resolute  and  persistent  energy  that  after  his 
time  neither  SabeUianism  nor  a  doctrine  of  subordination 
affecting  the  intrinsic  nature  of  the  Son  could  make 
headway.  But  withal  Athanasius  never  wavered  in  the 
belief  that  the  Father  is  the  source  and  fountain  of  deity. 
These  two  aspects  of  theory,  the  one  identifying  the  Son 
with  the  Father's  essence,  the  other  representing  the  Son 
as  somehow  caused  by,  or  derived  from,  the  Father  as 
the  Divine  Monad,  are  both  present  in  his  writings, 
and  neither  can  be  ignored  in  an  estimate  of  the  whole. 
Animadversions,  no  doubt,  may  be  made  upon  this  or  that 
defect  in  his  teaching.  We  should  put  differently  his 
point  that  God  is  Father  "  by  nature,  and  not  of  will,"  for 
to  the  modern  mind  will  is  the  very  core  and  essence  of 
personality.  And  the  Lord's  humanity  is  referred  to 
with  ominous  frequency  in  terms  which  might  seem  to 
make  it  consist  only  of  the  flesh.  Nor  will  Athanasius' 
exegesis  always  bear  inspection,  though  he  has  an  instinct 
for  the  really  important  passages  of  the  New  Testament. 
His  power  lay  in  his  possession  of  the  truth,  and  in  his 
worthy  representation  of  a  great  cause.  His  phraseology 
is  by  no  means  sacrosanct,  and  we  should  often  apply  a 
different  mode  of  argument ;  but  with  the  New  Testament 
in  our  hands  it  is  impossible  not  to  acquiesce  in  his  main 
conclusion.  Even  the  word  "  consubstantial  "  (o/xoovaco^), 
so  fiercely  assailed  both  then  and  now,  is  but  the  assertion 
of  the  real  deity  of  Christ  in  terms  of  the  philosophy  by 
which  it  had  been  denied.^ 

1  Cf.  Illingworth,  Eeasmi  and  Revelation,  123.  "The  place  of 
Athanasius  as  a  great  religious  leader  has  been  obscured  by  his  position  as 
a  theologian  ;  but  when  we  turn  to  his  writings,  where  do  we  lind  less  of 
what  is  .commonly  called  dogmatic  theology  ?     There  is  argument,  reason- 


MARCELLUS    OF    ANCYRA  189 

§  4.  Marcdlus  of  Anryra. — At  Nica\a,  we  have  seen 
victory  being  snatched  by  a  resohite  minority  in  face 
of  an  immensely  larger  but  divided  party.  The  great 
mediating  group — often  called  Eusebians,  or  later  Semi- 
Arians,  though  this  term  really  belongs  to  the  later 
party  of  Homoeans — quickly  recovered  themselves,  and  a 
reaction  ensued.  The  belief  of  the  churches  was  against 
Arius,  yet  not  definitely  for  Nica^a.  This  at  all  events 
holds  true  of  the  East,  wdiere  conservative  feeling  inclined 
strongly  to  the  indefinite  Christological  formulas  of  an 
older  time.  Two  objections  were  made.  In  the  first 
place,  6/jioovaio<;  was  a  new  word,  and  it  was  an  unheard- 
of  thing  thus  to  put  an  vmscriptural  expression  (and  one 
previously  condemned)  into  a  creed — not  the  creed  of  a 
particular  bishop,  but  a  symbol  or  definition  constructed 
by  a  general  Council,  and  meant  for  the  whole  Church. 
To  this  Athanasius  rejoins  that  "  if  the  expressions  are 
not  in  so  many  words  in  the  Scriptures,  yet  they  contain 
the  sense  of  the  Scriptures."  ^  Secondly,  the  Nicene 
doctrine  was  denounced  as  Sabellian.  Some  colour,  it 
may  be  admitted,  was  given  to  this  accusation  by  the 
teaching  of  Marcellus  of  Ancyra,  than  whom  the  Nicene 
Creed  had  no  more  ardent  champion.  His  is  a  curiously 
modern  type  of  theory  in  certain  aspects,  and  will  repay 
a  brief  examination.^ 

ing,  searching  for  proofs  and  their  statement ;  but  all  that  belongs  to  the 
outworks  of  his  teaching.  The  central  citadel  is  a  sjjiritual  intuition — I 
k7iow  that  my  Saviour  is  the  God  Who  made  heaven  and  earth.  He  took 
his  stand  firmly  and  unflinchingly  on  that  personal  experience,  and  all  else 
mattered  little  compared  with  the  fundamental  spiritual  fact.  It  was  not 
his  arguments,  but  his  unflinching  faith,  that  convinced  his  generation" 
(Lindsay,  History  of  the  R'J'ormation,  vol.  i.  433).  Athanasius  felt  less 
interest  in  the  problem  of  the  theanthropic  Person,  and  can  hardly  be  said 
to  recognise  the  distinction  of  ^icrsoji  and  nature.     Cf.  Scheel,  102. 

1  de  Deer.  21. 

2  A  clear,  if  rather  unsympathetic,  account  of  the  Christology  of 
Marcdlus  is  given  by  Gwatkin,  Studies  of  Arianism,  75-82.  See  also 
Moberly's  valuable  note,  Atonement  and  Personality,  208-15  ;  and  Sanday, 
in  HDB.  iv.  579.  A  modern  writer  who  resembles  Marcellus  is  the  cele- 
brated Moses  Stuart  of  Andover  ;  see  some  interesting  pages  in  Foster's 
History  of  the  New  England  Theology,  chap.  x. 


190  THE    PERSON    OF    JESUS    CHRIST 

His  main  interest  in  the  unity  of  God  was 
exhibited  in  an  energetic  antipathy  to  the  ditheism 
he  felt  to  be  encouraged  by,  if  not  immediately  derived 
from,  the  teaching  of  Origen.  But  he  was  not  con- 
sciously a  Sabellian.  Instead,  he  went  back,  as  he  not 
quite  unnaturally  believed,  to  the  authentic  doctrine  of  the 
New  Testament.  Holding  with  the  Arians  that  genera- 
tion carried  with  it  the  inferiority  of  the  Son,  as  neither 
co-eternal  nor  co-equal  with  the  Father,  he  rejected  the 
term  "  Son "  as  a  designation  of  the  pre-existent  One. 
"  Logos "  is  the  proper  term ;  the  Son,  on  the  other 
hand,  said  Marcellus,  was  generate  at  His  birth  "four 
hundred  years  ago,"  at  which  point  of  time  the  Logos 
— i.e.  the  eternally  inherent  power  of  God,  which  emerged 
before  time  to  create  the  world — came  forth  into  personal 
subsistence.  The  original  emergence  of  the  Logos  being 
"  an  active  extension  of  the  Godhead,"  ^  the  relative  dis- 
tinction implied  in  it  was  augmented  by  the  incarna- 
tion ;  the  incarnate  Logos,  as  he  puts  it,  is  "  separated 
from  the  Father  by  the  weakness  of  flesh,"  yet  without 
change  in  His  previous  relation.  In  fine,  "  the  "Word 
as  such  is  pure  spirit,  and  only  became  the  Son  of  God 
by  becoming  the  Son  of  Man."^  In  the  same  way,  the 
Spirit  exists  only  since  Christ  breathed  it  on  His  disciples. 
"  We  see  the  Monad  being  expanded  into  a  Triad."  ^  At 
the  Parousia,  Christ  will  appear  in  flesh  once  more  ;  tliere- 
after  the  relation  of  Sonship  will  terminate,  "  the  Logos 
being  merged  in  God  as  He  was  before  the  existence  of 
the  world."  What  will  then  become  of  His  body, 
unworthy  of  God  in  any  case,  it  is  impossible  to  say. 

If  not  Sabellian,  the  theory  was  at  least  Sabellian- 
ising.  That  its  author  was  acknowledged  by  the  great 
bulk  of  the  Homousians  proves  how  sincerely  they  held 
the  Divine  unity,  and  took  the  threefold  historic  revela- 
tion as  the  point  of  departure.  Marcellus  met  them  here. 
The   Christ  of   the    Gospels    is    Kara    Truevfia    the  eternal 

^  irXarvveadai  ivepyeiq,.  ^  Gwatkin,  Arian  Controversy,  54. 

'  7j  /j.6i'as  (paiferai  7r\aTvvofi4vr]  els  rpidda. 


THE   OAPPADOCIAN    DIVINES  191 

Logos,  aud,  until  His  final  abdication,  partner  in  the 
throne  of  God.  But  the  scheme  was  at  once  rejected  as 
involving  a  merely  transitory  incarnation  ;  and  un(|uestion- 
ably,  so  far  as  language  goes,  tlie  Son  of  God  is  in 
Marcellus'  view  a  mere  phenomenon  of  time.  He  came 
into  collision  with  Christian  feeling  even  more  violently 
by  the  suggestion  that  the  Lord's  liumanity  itself  is  but 
a  temporary  vesture,  a  servant's  form  to  be  laid  aside 
when  the  servant's  work  is  done.  But  in  justice  we 
should  remember  that  his  refusal  of  the  name  "  Son  "  to 
the  pre-incarnate  Christ  appears  not  to  have  been  quite 
definitive  after  all.  He  fought  passionately  for  the  Nicene 
Creed,  in  which  the  pre-existent  One  is  Son,  not  Logos ; 
and  when  in  371  his  followers  presented  a  creed  to 
Athanasius,  it  was  found  to  contain  a  distinct  acknowledg- 
ment of  the  eternal  Sonship,  with  anathemas  upon  those 
who  held  the  contrary.  At  all  events,  Athanasius  never 
disowned  him  publicly,  though  he  tacitly  refutes  him  in 
the  Fourth  Discourse  against  the  Arians.  Not  till  380 
was  Marcellus  condemned  in  the  West.  "  Of  whose 
kingdom  there  shall  be  no  end,"  in  the  so-called  Nicaeno- 
Constantinopolitan  Creed,  is  aimed  at  him. 

§  5.  Movements  of  Semiarianism- ;  the  Cajipadocian 
Divines. — Under  Constantine,  who  died  in  337,  and  especi- 
ally in  the  reign  of  his  successor  Constantius,  the  mediating 
party  were  high  favourites  at  court.  In  351  his  brother's 
death  left  Constantius  sole  Emperor.  At  once  his  will 
became  law  in  religion.  Many  of  the  noblest  Westerns,  in- 
cluding Hilary  of  Poictiers  and  Hosius  of  Cordova,  endured 
exile  for  the  sake  of  the  Nicene  faith.  In  35G,  Athanasius 
fled  to  the  desert  for  the  third  time,  not  to  return  for  six 
years,  aud  the  triumph  of  Arianism  seemed  complete. 
Under  the  leadership  of  ^tius  of  Antioch  and  Eunomius 
of  Cyzicus,  men  came  forward  to  revive  the  teaching  of 
Arius  in  its  most  objectionable  form.  Only  logic  is 
wanted,  and  logic  tells  us  that  if  God  is  unbegotten  and 
His  essence  simple,  there  is  no  mystery  in  His  being ;  on 


192  THE   PERSON    OF   JESUS    CHRIST 

the  other  haud,  and  with  equal  obviousness,  if  the  Son  is 
unbegotten  He  cannot  be  God  as  the  Father  is ;  nay,  in 
strictness.  He  cannot  be  like  the  Father  at  all,  for  He  is 
a  mere  creature.  Euzoius  only  put  this  Anhomoean 
position  bluntly  when  at  Antioch  in  361  he  carried 
the  position  that  the  Son  is  Kara  Travra  av6fioLo<i  rw 
irarpL  The  next  step  was  explicitly  to  condemn  the 
Nicene  Creed ;  and  this  was  duly  done  in  the  Sirmian 
manifesto  (357),  an  overtly  Arian  document  in  which  it 
was  declared  that  the  words  essence,  of  the  same  essence, 
or  of  like  essence,  ought  not  to  be  used,  because  they  do 
not  occur  in  the  Holy  Scriptures,  and  because  the  matter 
passes  human  comprehension.^  Even  the  veteran  Hosius 
was  compelled  to  sign,  though  he  would  not  condemn 
Athanasius.  This  seemed  to  make  an  end  of  the  Nicene 
doctrine  for  good.  But  the  policy  of  huddling  up  diffi- 
culties in  silence  rarely  prospers,  nor  was  the  situation 
cleared  by  the  sedulous  evasiveness  of  the  definition 
promoted  by  the  new  Homcean  party  soon  after  at  the 
conference  in  Sirmium  (359):  "We  say  that  the  Son  is 
like  the  Father  in  all  things,  as  the  Holy  Scriptures  say 
and  teach."  ^  In  the  capacious  ambiguity  of  a  phrase 
like  this,  even  the  punctuation  of  which  was  uncertain, 
all  sorts  of  opinion  were  at  home.  Meanwhile,  these 
minimising  tendencies  made  little  or  no  headway  in  the 
West. 

Throughout  the  East  also  they  were  opposed  strongly. 
In  358,  Basil  presided  over  a  council  at  Ancyra,  which 
affirmed  very  emphatically  the  Son's  similarity  of  essence, 
and  formed  the  turning-point  of  the  contest  by  giving 
rise  to  the  Homoeousian  party.  Eejecting  the  Nicene 
"  consubstantial "  as  Sabellian,  they  declined  the  Anhomoean 
position  still  more  vehemently.^  Gradually  they  began 
slowly  to  approximate  to  the  Nicene  theology,  feeling 
that  with  it  lay  the  future  of  religion.  Athanasius 
returned  once  more  to  Alexandria,  and  held  out  a  con- 
ciliatory hand.  He  recognised  {de  Synodis)  that  the 
1  See  Halm,  §  161.  ^  Ibid.  §  163.  »  Ibid.  §  162. 


THE    YOUNGER    NICENE    PARTY  193 

Homoooiisian  formula  "  of  like  essence "  was  distinctly 
meant  both  to  aflirm  Christ's  true  Sonship  and  to  deny 
His  creaturehood ;  and  though  preferring  his  own  terms, 
he  was  willing  to  discuss  the  matter.  Two  points  are 
worth  noting.  When  Basil  and  his  friends  urged  that 
6/jLoovaio<;  should  be  replaced  by  6fioio<i  Kar  ovaiav,  they 
meant  no  casual  resemblance,  but  rather  specific  identity ; 
Christ  is  essentially  like  God  as  a  human  son  is  like  his 
father.  And  again,  it  was  among  these  Homceousian 
writers  first  that  ovaia  and  viroaraai'i  began  to  be  distin- 
guished clearly  ;  the  one  being  used  to  designate  the  Divine 
essence  (Lat.  substantia),  the  other  to  denote  a  personal 
distinction  within  the  Godhead  (Lat.  persona).  They  felt 
that  if  this  useful  differentiation  of  the  general  from  the 
individual  were  adopted,  all  danger  of  taking  the  Nicene 
formula  in  a  Sabellian  sense  would  be  gone.  The  under- 
standing on  these  points  attained  between  Athauasius 
and  the  Homceousians  at  the  Council  of  Alexandria  in 
362,  ensured  the  ultimate  fall  of  Arianism,  and  issued  in 
the  formation  of  the  younger  Nicene  party.  The  same 
Council  repudiated  the  view  that  the  Holy  Spirit  is  "a 
creature,"  or  distinct  from  the  essence  of  the  Son,  a  tenet 
which  had  been  maintained  by  a  group  led  by  Mace- 
donius  of  Constantinople. 

This  younger  Nicene  party  was  headed  by  three 
remarkable  men,  Basil  of  Ctesarea  (died  379),  his  friend 
Gregory  of  Nazianzus  (died  389),  and  his  brother 
Gregory  of  Nyssa  (died  after  394).  They  were  enthusi- 
astic students  of  Origen — in  spite  of  the  growing  tendency 
to  rank  him  as  heretical — who  revered  Athanasius  as  the 
father  of  orthodoxy.  By  interpreting  his  theology  in 
an  Origenistic  sense,  they  lent  to  it  a  colour  consider- 
ably different  from  the  original.  But  their  influence  on 
the  doctrine  of  the  Trinity  was  profound.  Assuming  the 
three  hypostases  in  the  Godhead,  they  strove  to  bring 
out  the  unity  of  the  one  Divine  essence,  and  to  fix  their 
results  the  significance  of  the  principal  terms  was  defined 
with  a  new  sharpness.  "  'Ouaia  now  received  a  signifi- 
es 


194  THE    PERSON    OF   JESUS    CHRIST 

cance  midway  between  the  abstract  '  essence '  and  the 
concrete  '  individual,'  yet  so  that  it  inclined  very  strongly 
to  the  former ;  V7r6aracn,<i  was  placed  in  meaning  midway 
between  person  and  quality  (accident  or  '  mode '),  yet  so 
that  the  personal  idea  was  the  stronger."  ^  Starting  as 
they  did  from  the  threeness  in  the  Divine,  with  the  unity 
as  a  mysterious  problem,  it  was  particularly  difficult  for 
the  Cappadocians  to  avoid  the  semblance  of  tritheism, 
and  this  was  an  accusation  long  current  in  the  West. 

In  Christology,  their  work  largely  resulted  in  a  revival 
of  the  idea  of  the  Logos,  as  mediator  of  creation.  And 
yet  they  ring  out  clearly  the  believing  certainty  that  only 
through  God  Himself  is  fellowship  with  God  accessible  to 
man.  This  determines  their  view  of  the  Lord's  person. 
But  they  lay  the  emphasis  otherwise  than  Athanasius. 
Basil,  for  example,  argues  that  the  revelation  of  the  Image 
of  God  in  flesh  gives  us  that  knowledge  of  God  which 
makes  us  like  Him,  and  that  only  He  who  is  the  essential 
Good  can  perfect  us  in  goodness.  Gregory  of  Nazianzus 
contends  that  none  can  deify  our  spirits  save  He  who  is 
Spirit  essentially,  and  that  only  the  death  of  the  Son  of 
God  can  atone  for  the  sins  of  the  whole  world.  Gregory 
of  Nyssa  looks  back  more  eagerly  to  the  historic  Christ, 
pointedly  naming  Him,  however,  "  the  only-begotten  God," 
wholly  identical  in  essence  with  the  Father. 

In  381  the  Emperor  Theodosius  convoked  a  general 
Council  at  Constantinople,  and  there,  in  addition  to  the 
condemnation  of  the  Sabellians  and  the  various  types  of 
Arian,  the  Nicene  Creed  in  its  original  form  was  ratified. 
No  new  creed  was  set  forth.  For  centuries  tradition  held 
that  the  creed  now  commonly  known  as  the  Nicene  ^ 
(technically  the  Nicteno  -  Constantinopolitan)  had  been 
promulgated  at  this  Council,  which  is  certainly  an  error. 
It  came  into  existence  earlier,  and  has  close  resemblances 
to  a  creed  which,  as  Epiphanius  relates,  was  used  by 
the  Church  of  Salamis  in  Cyprus.      Others  connect  it  with 

1  Harnack,  Grundriss,  182  ;  cf.  Loofs,  in  HE.  iv.  46. 

2  Hahn,  §  144. 


COUNCIL   OF   CONSTANTINOPLE  195 

the  baptismal  creed  of  the  Church  of  Jerusalem.  In  the 
acts  of  the  Council  of  Chalcedon  it  is  ascribed  to  the 
150  bishops  who  met  at  Constantinople,  and  put  on  a 
par  with  the  original  Nicene  Creed,  which  thenceforward 
it  virtually  displaced.  Its  phrasing  and  order  are  distinctly 
inferior  to  those  of  its  predecessor.  "  The  elaborate  frame- 
work of  Nicsea  is  completely  shattered,  and  even  the 
keystone  clause  '  of  the  essence  of  the  Father '  is  left 
out."i 

The  Arian  conflict  was  now  over,  and  the  East  could 
lay  aside  its  fear  of  Sabellianising  definitions. 
*  Gwatkin,  Arian  Controversy,  160. 


CHAPTER  V. 

CONTROVERSIES   AS   TO  THE   FULL   HUMANITY 
OF   CHRIST. 

§  1.  ApoUinarianism. — It  was  now  an  axiom  that  the 
Divine  manifested  in  Jesus  Christ  was  one  in  essence 
with  supreme  Godhead,  His  real  humanity  also  had 
been  assumed  from  the  first,  and  explicitly  defended  in 
opposition  to  Gnostic  docetism.  But  men  had  scarcely 
reflected  on  the  question  how  two  natures  could  unite 
in  one  personality,  or  how  room  could  be  made,  in  a  life 
thus  dual  or  composite,  for  human  nature  as  a  whole. 
Tertullian  had  spoken  of  "  two  substances  in  one  person  "  ; 
but  this  was  a  Western  formula.  The  instinctive  feeling 
of  the  Church  was  of  course  that  in  order  to  save  man 
Christ  must  Himself  be  man.  But  if  God  and  man  are 
actually  disparate  and  incommensurable,  how  shall  this 
deep  craving  of  the  believing  consciousness  be  satisfied  ? 
The  problem  could  not  be  resolved  by  the  merely  figurative 
declaration  that  the  humanity  of  Jesus  is  in  the  Logos  as 
glowing  iron  in  fire. 

We  have  seen  that  in  the  Nicene  Creed  "  made  flesh  " 
was  explained  by  the  added  phrase  "  made  man,"  in  order 

Literature — Voisin,  L'Apollinarisme,  1901  ;  Lietzmann,  Apollinaris 
von  Laodicea  und  seine  Schule,  1904  ;  Holl,  Amphilochius  von  Ikonium  in 
seinem  VerhaUnis  zm  den  grossen  Kappadoziern,  1904 ;  Svvete,  article 
"Theodorus,"  in  Did.  Chr.  Biog.  ;  Harnack,  article  "Antiochienische 
Schule,"  RE.  i.  ;  Bright,  History  of  the  Church  313-415 ;  Loofs,  articles 
on  "Nestorius,"  HU.  xiii.,  and  "Eutyches,"  EK  v.;  Rainy,  Ancient 
Catholic  Church,  1902  ;  Kriiger,  article  "  C^rill  von  Alexandrien,"  BE.  iv.  ; 
Loofs,  Leontius  von  Byzantium,  1887  ;  Kriiger,  Mo7i02)hysitische  Streitig- 
Tceiten,  1884  ;  Curtis,  History  of  Creeds,  1911  ;  Hefele,  Concilien- 
geschich/e,  iii. 

196 


APOLLINARIS  197 

to  exclude  the  Arian  tenet  that  Christ  had  a  human 
body  but  no  human  soul.  Eudoxius  of  Constantinople 
had  put  the  Arian  view  unambiguously  in  the  creed  known 
by  his  name :  "  He  took  no  human  soul,  but  became  flesh. 
.  .  ,  Two  natures  there  were  not,  but  instead  of  the  soul, 
was  God  in  flesh,  the  whole  one  composite  nature,"  ^  Not! 
even  Athanasius  had  grappled  with  the  interior  problems 
of  the  theanthropic  Life.  He  was  accustomed  to  speak  of 
the  Logos  as  having  assumed  a  human  body,  or  simply  flesh  ; 
and  while  the  Saviour  was  for  him — at  least  in  his  earlier 
phase — an  individual  man,  he  frequently  operates  with 
the  conception  "  flesh  "  as  denoting  an  impersonal  vesture 
or  instrument,  to  which  it  was  natural  to  refer  the 
phenomena  of  suffering,  progress,  and  exaltation.  But  he 
never  worked  out  a  clear  view.  An  extraordinary  variety 
of  opinion  prevailed  as  to  the  relation  of  Christ's  manhood 
to  ours.  Harnack  points  out  that  docetism,  of  a  finer  or 
coarser  shade,  was  almost  universal.  Few  ascribed  to 
Christ  a  genuinely  human  soul,  and  by  many  His  flesh 
was  conceived  as  heavenly  in  character,  as  a  transmuted 
form  of  the  Logos,  or  simply  as  a  garment.  "No  one  in 
the  East  really  thought  of  two  natures.  One  eternal 
Divine-human  nature,  one  Divine-human  nature  that  has 
come  to  be,  a  Divine  nature  temporarily  changed  into  the 
human,  a  Divine  nature  inhabiting  the  human  or  clad  in 
a  veil  of  humanity — these  were  the  dominating  ideas."  ^ 
If  the  Church  was  to  pronounce  on  the  connection  between 
the  Divine  and  human  in  Christ,  she  had  first  to  clear 
up  her  mind  as  to  the  significance  of  His  humanity. 

Apollinaris  of  Laodicea  (died  about  390)  was  the  first 
to  raise  the  question  in  an  acute  form.  A  theologian 
of  the  first  rank,  he  set  the  problems  at  which  after- 
centuries  laboured.  His  dominating  aim  was  to  secure 
the  complete  unity  of  Christ's  person  without  sacrificing 
His  real  deity,  or  representing  Him,  with  Paul  of 
Samosata  or  Photinus,  as  a  mere  dv6p(t)7ro<;  evOeo'i.  But 
he    considered    the    Arians    were    right    in    objecting    to 

1  Hahn,  §  191.  2  Qrundriss,  191. 


198  THE    PERSON    OF   JESUS    CHRIST 

the  current  doctrine  that  it  predicated  of  Christ  two 
personalities ;  to  quote  his  words,  "  if  perfect  God  were 
joined  to  perfect  man,  they  would  be  two — one,  Son 
of  God  by  nature,  one  by  adoption "  (^ero?).^  A  man- 
God  is  really  as  unthinkable  as  a  centaur.  We  must 
apply  the  fundamental  axiom  of  logic  that  two  perfect 
entities  cannot  become  one.  Besides,  how  can  we  ascribe 
freedom  of  will  to  the  man  Jesus,  without  such  risks 
as  faith  dare  not  accept  ?  Where  complete  manhood  is, 
there  is  sin.  For  these  reasons  Apollinaris  was  obliged 
to  deny  the  entirety  of  Christ's  human  nature.  At 
first  he  held  that  the  Logos,  had  taken  merely  a  human 
body ;  later,  in  a  defensive  statement  of  his  position,  he 
developed  the  view — resting  on  a  trichotomic  pyschology 
(cf.  1  Th  5^) — that  the  body  and  soul  in  Christ  were 
human,  whereas  the  place  of  the  human  spirit  was  taken 
by  the  Logos.  Thus  he  attained  his  supreme  object ;  the 
human  spirit,  source  and  seat  of  mutability,  is  replaced 
by  the  immutable  Divine  Word.  The  danger  is  removed, 
not  by  curtailing  the  Divine  nature,  which  would  be 
heresy,  but  by  leaving  out  that  element  in  man's  being 
which  means  a  perilous  fallibility.  As  a  further  ad- 
vantage, the  fatal  deficiencies  of  Arianism  are  vetoed, 
for  the  Logos  contemplated  in  this  scheme  is  no  mere 
creature,  but  eternally  and  inherently  one  with  God. 

These  difficulties  surmounted,  Apollinaris  was  able  to 
describe  the  Logos  and  the  abridged  human  nature  as 
having  been  fused  in  "  a  single  nature,"  "  a  single  essence." 
Instead  of  two  natures,  which  imply  two  self-conscious 
and  self-determining  subjects,  what  exists  is  an  essential 
union  of  God  and  man.  There  is  but  one  incarnate  nature 
of  God  the  Word  {[jbiav  (pvaiv  tov  Oeov  \6yov  o-ecrapKOi^evqv).^ 
Apollinaris  took  this  so  literally  as  to  affirm  an  actual 
deification  of  the  flesh  of  Christ,  thus  furnishing  a  reasoned 
basis  for  the  physical  doctrine  of  redemption  current  in 
the  Greek  theology.  "  His  flesh,"  we  read,  "  makes  us 
alive  through  the  Deity  now  become  one  essence  with  it,  for 
1  Fragm.  81.  ^  j^^  Jovian.  1.     Hahn,  §  195. 


ONE   INCARNATE    NATURE  199 

the  flesh  is  Diviue,  having  heen  joined  to  God."^  On  liis 
special  presuppositions,  however,  the  outcome  of  Apollinaris' 
argument  could  scarcely  fail  to  be  docetic ;  and  we  are 
not  surprised  that  at  last  he  should  venture  upon  the 
statement  that  Christ's  flesh  is  not  consubstantial  with 
ours,  since  it  is  the  very  flesh  of  God.  It  is  even  in 
a  sense  pre-existent.  It  may  be  that  in  speaking  of 
the  pre-temporal  reality  of  Christ's  flesh  Apollinaris 
meant  to  indicate  the  belief  that  the  Logos,  as  such,  is 
archetypal  man,  "  not  foreign  to  that  human  spirit  which 
is  in  His  likeness,  but  rather  the  true  perfection  of  His 
image."  But  in  that  case  his  expressions  have  an  un- 
fortunate obscurity. 

Scholars  are  on  the  whole  agreed  in  acknowledging 
the  singular  intellectual  brilliance  and  power  of  Apollinaris' 
work.  Indeed,  his  theory  of  the  person  of  Christ  has  with 
some  reason  been  declared  by  certain  modern  writers  to 
be  the  most  consistent  and  successful  application  known 
to  us  of  the  psychological  presuppositions  and  speculative 
categories  of  his  time.  It  is  a  question  whether  even 
Athanasius  had  greater  gifts  for  pure  theology.  The  fact 
is  all  the  more  remarkable — may  we  not  say,  the  more  pro- 
videntially significant  ? — that,  notwithstanding  the  marked 
strain  of  docetism  in  previous  Christologies,  the  Church 
at  this  point  definitely  refused  to  follow  a  daring  thinker 
who  seemed  only  to  regularise  and  make  logical  her  own 
docetic  tendencies.  Her  reasons  for  this  refusal  are  con- 
vincing. In  the  first  place,  it  was  felt  that  Apollinaris 
taufht  no  real  incarnation  after  all.  In  becoming  man, 
the  Son  of  God  took  possession  only  of  a  partial  or 
mutilated  humanity.  Not  only  so ;  that  very  constituent 
of  human  nature  was  left  out  which  is  intrinsically  akin 
to  God  and  capable  of  vital  relations  to  Him,  and  God  is 
conceived  as  "uniting  Himself  only  with  that  in  man 
which  he  shares  with  the  beasts  that  perish."  ^  Doubtless 
by  maintaining  that  the  Logos  can  thus  replace  the  principle 
of  intelligence  and  moral  action  in  man,  Apollinaris  so  far 

^  Fragm.  116.         *  Caird,  The  Fundamental  Ideas  of  Christianity,  ii.  156. 


200  THE    PERSON    OF    JESUS    CHRIST 

brings  out  the  close  relationship  of  the  Divine  and  the 
human,  for  only  related  things  can  be  substituted  for  each 
other;  but  this  furnishes  no  compensation  for  so  grave 
an  omission.  Again,  sin  is  primarily  an  affair  of  man's 
spiritual  being ;  it  is  the  spirit  that  is  corrupted,  misguided, 
estranged  from  God :  hence  the  salvation  we  require  must 
be  applied  to  and  take  possession  of  that  focal  poinl:  of 
human  life,  and  this,  according  to  the  theory  of  Apollinaris, 
is  precisely  what  cannot  be.  As  Gregory  of  Nazianzus 
put  it  tersely :  "  that  which  is  unassumed  is  unhealed " 
(to  7ap  airpocrkrjTTTov,  aOepdirevTov).  The  very  part  of 
man  in  which  sin  resides  gains  nothing  from  the  redemptive 
powers  of  Christ,  and  consequently  falls  short  of  eternal  life. 
And  yet  again,  owing  very  much  to  his  use  of  categories 
which  are  more  physical  or  metaphysical  than  ethicat, 
Apollinaris  tends  to  define  God  and  man  as  absolute 
contraries  which  cannot  on  any  terms  be  truly  one. 
God  is  immutable,  man  is  mutable;  God  is  essentially 
self-moving,  man  is  wholly  passive ;  from  which  it 
obviously  follows  that  a  living  unity  of  the  two  is  in- 
conceivable. "We  have  to  choose  between  a  human  and  a 
Divine  spirit  in  Christ.  The  sublime  thought  that  Christ 
is  perfect  in  His  humanity  just  because  of  the  personal 
indwelling  of  God,  and  thereby  becomes  the  Head  of  a 
new  redeemed  race,  has  completely  fallen  out  of  siglit. 
Nevertheless,  in  spite  of  these  grave  defects,  which  prepared 
the  way  for  Monophysitism,  Apollinaris  quickened  the 
mind  of  the  Church  and  forced  an  interest  in  vital 
questions.  In  particular,  he  made  it  necessary  for  those 
who  rejected  his  conclusions  to  admit  into  their  view  of 
Christ  a  real  belief  in  His  spiritual  experience  as  man, 
lived  out  "  not  under  unnatural  or  supernaturally  guarded 
conditions,  but  under  strictly  human  conditions  of  growth, 
trial,  dependence,  and  freedom,"  ^  It  was  a  lesson  the 
Church  took  centuries  to  learn. 

The  task  of  combating  the  Apollinarian  positions  fell 
chiefly  to  the  two  Gregories,  who  were  themselves  perhaps 
^  Dykes,  in  Expos.  Times  for  Nov.  1905,  56. 


REFUTATION    OF    APOLLTNARIS  201 

too  near  the  heresy  to  strike  at  it  with  effect.  Gregory 
of  Nazianzus  rightly  finds  that  the  death  of  Christ  is  an 
atonement  only  as  it  is  the  death  of  One  who  is  true  man 
as  well  as  God,  and  we  have  already  seen  how  unerringly  he 
laid  his  finger  on  the  central  weakness  of  the  novel  theory. 
For  both  thinkers,  however,  the  subject  or  Ego  in  Christ 
was  the  Logos,  His  human  nature  being  no  more  than 
the  sphere  in  which  deification  should  take  place.  Gregory 
of  Nyssa  compares  the  relation  of  the  Divine  and  human 
to  that  between  a  drop  of  vinegar  and  the  sea  in  which 
it  is  swallowed  up,^  and  affirms  that  even  Christ's  body 
in  which  He  suffered  became  identical,  because  commingled, 
with  the  Divine  nature  that  assumed  it.^  Man's  weakness 
and  mutability  disappear  in  the  life  of  God.  Along  with 
this,  it  is  true,  went  a  strong  assertion  of  the  two  natures. 
It  was  the  manhood  that  wept  at  the  grave  of  Lazarus, 
the  Godhead  that  raised  him  up.  But  these  two  natures 
mutually  interpenetrate,  and  Gregory  of  Nyssa  threw 
out  the  valuable  idea  that  in  Christ's  person  we  see 
a  groiving  unity,  in  which  the  humanity  comes  fully  to 
partake  of  the  qualities  of  Godhead  only  after  the  passion 
and  the  resurrection.^  Thus  he  was  able  to  make  room 
for  the  human  life  of  Jesus. 

In  381,  at  the  Council  of  Constantinople,  Apollin- 
arianism  was  explicitly  condemned ;  but  neither  in  the 
Church  nor  outside  was  a  period  then  put  to  its  influence. 

§  2.  The  School  of  Anfioch :  Nesforim. — If  the  criticism 
of  the  Cappadociau  thinkers  occasionally  lacked  force,  it 
was  not  so  with  the  theologians  of  Antioch.  Diodorus, 
founder  of  the  exegetical  school  of  Antioch,  had  had 
as  his  most  famous  pupil  Theodore  of  Mopsuestia  (died 
429).  Theodore  came  to  the  problems  of  Christology 
with  a  mind  preoccupied  with  thoughts  of  the  inmiuta- 
bility  of  God,  the  freedom  of  the  will,  and  the  reality  of 
Jesus'  human  life.     We  must  gain  a  point  of  view  from 

J  Cf.  Drjiseke,  op.  cil.  175.  ^  contra  Eunumium,  c.  3. 

«  Cf.  Bonvvetsch,  Grundriss  d.  DG.  (1909),  89. 


202  THE    PERSON    OF    JESUS    CHRIST 

which  His  ethical  career  is  seen  as  exemplary  for  ours. 
Hence  no  more  can  be  affirmed  than  a  relative  moral 
union  of  Godhead  and  manhood ;  the  Saviour's  person 
consists  of  two  independent  natures,  each  complete  within 
itself,  but  united  in  one  personality  by  means  of  an 
ethical  bond  (avvu(j)eia).  God  is  present  in  Jesus  as  He 
was  in  saints  or  prophets,  only  in  complete  fulness,  not 
substantially  but  by  way  of  grace  or  favour  (kut  evhoKiav, 
not  Kar  ovaiav),  and  in  a  union  which  is  perfected  at 
the  ascension.  There  is  a  oneness  accordingly  for  the 
spectator,  a  oneness  of  name,  worship,  honour ;  but  the 
unity  so  affirmed  is  imported  into  the  object  by  the  mind, 
not  resident  in  its  actual  constitution.  The  passion,  for 
instance,  does  not  touch  the  Godhead.  Theodore  could 
even  speak  of  two  "  hypostases,"  or  persons,  united  as  it 
were  by  a  moral  league. 

This  mode  of  interpretation,  beyond  all  doubt,  held 
within  it  elements  of  value.  To  it  the  Church  owed  a 
vivid  realisation  of  the  earthly  career  of  Jesus,  with 
all  its  richness  of  ethical  experience,  and  that  human 
individuality  of  life  which  means  so  much  for  us  to-day. 
"  Probably,"  as  Dykes  has  put  it,  "  Theodore's  best 
contribution  to  the  subject  lay  in  his  insistence  that 
the  development  of  our  Lord  in  knowledge  and  virtue 
could  be  no  Oearpov,  but  a  genuine  human  progress 
culminating  in  genuine  human  virtue;  and  that  this 
human  life  and  character,  with  its  free  self-determination 
and  moral  victories,  was  essential  to  His  work  of  redemp- 
tion." ^  And  yet  there  was  not  a  little  in  the  rational 
supernatural  ism  of  Antioch  to  awaken  the  misgivings 
of  faith.  While  Theodore  himself  fulminated  against 
Paul  of  Samosata  as  an  angeliis  diaboli,  many  others 
believed  that  lines  of  connection  could  easily  be  traced 
from  Samosata  to  Antioch,  and  that  the  advantages  of 
consistency  and  clearness  were  entirely  on  the  side 
of  the  older  writer.  Theodore  and  his  group,  it  goes 
without  saying,  were  convinced  adherents  of  Nicsea,  and 

*  Op.  cit.  55. 


THE   SCHOOL    OF    ANTIOCH  203 

in  all  sincerity  acknowledged  the  presence  of  the  Eternal 
"Word  in  Clirist.  But  in  point  of  fact  it  was  difficult  for 
them  to  call  Jesus  more  than  a  supremely  inspired  man. 
He  is  man  side  by  side  with  God,  man  in  alliance  with 
God,  not  God  in  and  through  and  as  man.  There  is 
concord  of  will  and  purpose,  not  the  oneness  of  a  single 
personal  life.  Now,  only  those  could  be  content  with  this, 
whose  conception  of  salvation  had  declined  from  the  New 
Testament  level.  It  was  not  merely  that  the  Antiochenes 
repudiated  the  physical  doctrine  of  redemption,  for  so  far 
they  were  on  right  lines ;  it  was  rather  that  they  scarcely 
felt  the  necessity  for  pardon  and  regeneration.  Christ 
to  them  is  the  Leader  and  Perfecter  of  faith  rather 
than  a  Eedeemer  who  quickens  and  restores  the  soul  by 
inward  grace.  The  same  tendency  to  emphasise  the 
ethical  more  than  the  religious  aspects  of  the  Gospel  is 
shown  by  the  fact  that  the  qualities  of  manhood  they 
fixed  upon  for  Christ,  and  vindicated  as  essential,  were 
abstract  moral  freedom  and  the  capacity  to  suffer. 

But  here,  as  in  the  Arian  controversy,  it  was  found 
that  views  which  might  be  held  quietly  in  schools  of 
doctrine  woke  the  sounds  of  strife  when  proclaimed 
in  the  Church  at  large.  A  liturgical  phrase  began 
the  war.  Nestorius,  patriarch  of  Constantinople  in 
428,  had  received  his  theological  education  at  Antioch. 
Offended  by  the  application  of  the  epithet  6eoT6Ko<i  to 
the  Virgin  Mary,  he  vehemently  took  sides  with  a 
presbyter  who  had  assailed  the  word  as  inaccurate  and 
extravagant.  It  was  a  popular  term,  and  even  Theodore 
had  used  it.  But  Nestorius  pronounced  it  heathenish. 
"  Mary,"  he  writes,  "  did  not  bear  the  Godhead ;  she 
bore  a  man  who  was  the  organ  of  Godhead."  Not 
6eoTOKo<i  but  XptcTOTOKo^  is  the  right  name.  As  Mr. 
Bethune-Baker  has  expressed  it :  "  What  he  feels  must 
be  guarded  against  at  all  costs  is,  on  the  one  hand,  the 
idea  that  the  Godhead  itself  was  born  of  a  woman,  wrapped 
in  swaddling-clothes,  suffered  and  died ;  and,  on  the  other 
hand,  the  idea  that  the  manhood  of  the  incarnate  Word 


204  THE    PERSON    OF    JESDS    CHRIST 

was  not  real  manhood  like  our  own."  ^  To  understand 
the  fierce  resistance  he  met  with,  we  must  consider  that 
the  word  now  assailed  had  come  to  be  a  testimony 
against  the  Unitarian  theories  of  the  day.  It  goes  back 
at  least  to  Athanasius  and  probably  to  Origen.  And 
that  Nestorius'  dislike  of  it  was  not  unreasoning,  or  the 
product  of  mere  negation,  is  clear  from  the  fact  that  he 
later  conceded  the  word,  provided  only  it  was  not  held  to 
make  the  Virgin  a  goddess. 

But  in  general  he  remained  true  to  the  Christological 
traditions  of  Antioch.  God  the  Word  is  sharply  dis- 
tinguished from  the  man  Jesus.  The  Holy  Spirit  did 
not  create  the  Word,  but  formed  a  temple  for  Him  from 
the  Virgin,  which  He  should  inhabit.  "  For  His  sake 
who  wears  I  worship  Him  that  is  worn ;  for  the  sake  of 
the  hidden  One  I  adore  Him  that  appears.  From  Him 
who  appears  God  is  inseparable :  for  this  reason  I  do  not 
separate  the  honour  of  Him  who  is  inseparate.  I  sever 
the  natures,  but  I  combine  the  worship."  ^  The  man 
Jesus  was  not  deified,  but  He  was  taken  into  a  unique 
personal  conjunction  with  the  Logos,  and  after  the  resur- 
rection lifted  up  to  a  share  in  His  universal  power. 
Loofs  has  pointed  out  ^  that  it  was  easier  for  Nestorius 

'■  Mr.  Betlnme-Baker  has  published  a  brief  work  in  which  he  endeavours 
to  clear  Nestorius'  reputation  for  orthodoxy  {JVcslorius  and  his  Teaching, 
Cambridge,  1908).  He  conies  to  the  conclusion  that  Nestorius  was  in 
reality  no  "Nestorian,"  since  "he  did  not  hold  the  belief  commonly 
attributed  to  him  that  in  Jesus  Christ  two  persons,  the  person  of  a  God 
and  the  person  of  a  man,  were  mechanically  joined  together,  one  being 
Son  by  nature  and  the  other  Son  by  association,  so  that  really  there  were 
two  Sons  and  two  Christs.  He  is  as  explicit  as  possible  on  this  point" 
(82).  And  again:  "He  did  not  think  of  two  distinct  persons  joined 
together,  but  of  a  single  Person  who  combined  in  Himself  the  two  distinct 
tilings  {substances),  Godhead  and  manhood,  with  their  characteristics 
(?i«<M?-cs)  complete  and  intact  though  united  in  Him"  (87);  "he  had  had 
all  thi'ough  the  weary  years  of  the  struggle  'one  only  end  in  view — that 
no  one  should  call  the  Word  of  God  a  creature,  or  the  nianliood  which 
was  assumed  incomplete'"  (197).  It  is  indeed  a  question  whether 
dualism  can  be  charged  upon  Nestorius  in  any  sense  that  would  not  also 
hold  against  the  Creed  of  Chalcedon. 

^  Serm.  9  (Loofs,  Nestoriana,  262).  ■  Leitfaden,  290. 


CYRIL   OF    ALEXANDRIA  205 

than  for  Theodore  to  emphasise  tlie  unity  of  Christ's 
personality,  because,  like  Marcellus  of  Ancyra,  he  regards 
the  terms  "  Son,"  "  Lord,"  and  even  "  only-begotten  "  as 
terms  proper  to  be  used  of  the  Incarnate,  rather  than 
"God  the  Word"  or  "Man."  For  they  express  the 
duality  of  nature  in  Him,  the  created  nature  and  the 
increate.  It  is  the  historic  Christ,  single  though  duplex 
in  nature,  that  forms  his  real  point  of  departure. 

§  3.  Cyril  of  Alexandria. — Nestorius  had  the  misfortune 
to  be  opposed  by  one  of  the  most  powerful  and  most  un- 
sympathetic figures  in  Church  history.  Cyril  (.376-444) 
had  been  bishop  of  Alexandria  since  412.  A  master  of 
diplomatic  intrigue,  unscrupulous  in  his  methods,  ambitious, 
proud,  and  violent,  he  was  nevertheless  a  really  great 
divine,  and  to  this  day  has  a  place  of  special  honour 
anions  the  teachers  of  the  Greek  Church. 

The  Christology  of  Cyril  in  its  essential  features  is 
a  continuation  of  the  theory  held  by  Athanasius  and 
Gregory  of  Nazianzus.  Like  them,  he  chiefly  aimed  at 
supplying  a  theoretical  basis  for  the  physical  theory  of 
redemption,  according  to  which  humanity  is  imbued  or 
saturated  with  deity  through  the  incarnation ;  and  the 
militant  opposition  which  this  involved  to  the  theologians 
of  Antioch,  who  denied  the  real  union  of  the  natures 
in  Christ,  was  the  predominant  influence  in  his  doctrinal 
activities.  Starting  from  the  eternal  being  of  the  Logos, 
as  a  hypostatic  distinction  in  the  Trinity,  he  teaches  that 
He  not  only  assumed  but  became  flesh,  and  formed  the 
personal  subject  in  the  God-man.^  Christ,  be  it  noted, 
was  not  an  individual  man.     On  the  contrary,  the  Word, 

^  Ottley  well  remarks  that  Cyril  gives  no  consistent  answer  to  the 
question  what  is  meant  by  the  "unity"  of  the  Divine  person.  At  one 
time  it  appears  as  an  original  unity,  being  constituted  by  tlie  one  unchange- 
able Logos  "who  remains  even  after  the  Incarnation  what  He  was  before 
it."  "Sometimes,  on  the  other  hand,  Cyril  speaks  of  the  person  of  Christ  as 
if  it  were  a  resultant  unity,"  issuing  from  the  amalgamation  of  the  two 
natures.  But  the  former  point  of  view  is  more  tyjjical.  {Doctrine  of  the 
Incarnation,  vol.  ii.  82.) 


206  THE   PERSON    OF   JESUS    CHRIST 

having  passed  into  human  nature,  as  constituted  by  rational 
soul  and  body — which  now  are  His  soul  and  body  indis- 
sociably — yet  remains  the  one  indivisible  subject  He  was 
prior  to  incarnation.  The  two  natures  are  in  no  way  con- 
fused or  mingled — "  the  flesh  is  flesh  and  not  deity,  even  if 
it  has  become  flesh  of  God  " — but  their  union  has  produced 
a  permanent  essential  state  or  fact ;  it  is  a  ei^cocrt?  Kar 
ovaiav  Koi  Kad  vTroaracnv,  a  6V(ocn<i  (f)vaiKi].  Manhood 
has  been  taken  up  intact  into  the  unity  of  the  Divine 
essence.  But  we  may  speak  of  a  certain  interchange  of 
the  properties,  in  this  sense  that  the  person  being  one, 
all  qualities  of  either  nature  can  be  predicated  of  the  one 
Christ.  Thus,  for  example,  the  Logos  is  visible  and  tangible, 
and  the  suffering  is  the  suffering  of  God.  The  natures  are 
distinct,  yet  when  we  see  them  most  truly  we  see  them  in 
a  mysteriously  intimate  cohesion,  all  that  properly  inheres 
in  the  one  passing  over  to,  and  becoming  the  possession  of, 
the  other.  There  are  no  doubt  occasional  infidelities  to 
this  point  of  view,  as  when  Cyril  declares  the  Logos  to  be 
as  little  affected  by  suffering  as  fire  in  glowing  steel  by 
the  smith's  hammer-strokes,  and  replaces  the  recorded 
limitations  of  our  Lord's  knowledge  by  what  is  really  a 
prudential  affectation  of  ignorance. 

A  favourite  mode  of  expression  with  Cyril  is  the 
phrase  that  Christ  is  "  one  out  of  two  natures "  (e«  Bvo 
(J3vaeoiv  eh).  In  other  words,  before  the  incarnation  two 
natures  existed,  thereafter  only  the  one  Divine-human 
nature  of  the  Lord.  Indeed,  we  encounter  once  again 
the  older  Apollinarian  formula,  "  one  incarnate  nature  of 
God  the  Word,"  which  Cyril  mistakenly  believed  to  be 
Athanasian.  The  phrase  is  an  epitome  of  his  polemic 
against  Nestorius.  The  Logos  had  not  united  with  Him- 
self the  person  of  man  ;  He  had  become  flesh,  and  the 
Virgin  had  borne  the  incarnate  Word  "according  to  the 
flesh."  As  soul  and  body  are  one  in  us,  so  Godhead  and 
manhood  were  made  the  one  Christ.  Hence  the  Nestorian 
assertion  of  a  mere  "  conjunction  "  or  "  contact "  is  to  be 
utterly  rejected ;  nothing  but  a  hypostatic  union  will  serve. 


CYRIL    OF    ALEXANDRIA  207 

"  If  the  "Word  did  not  siifrer  for  us  humanly,  He  did  not 
accomphsh  our  redemption  Divinely ;  if  He  who  suffered 
for  us  was  mere  man  and  but  the  organ  of  deity,  we  are 
not  in  fact  redeemed."  ^  One  detail  of  historical  import- 
ance should  be  noted.  Since  the  person  in  the  God-man 
is  but  the  prolongation  of  the  one  life  of  the  Eternal 
"Word — not  the  effect  of  incarnation — it  follows  in  Cyril's 
view  that  Christ's  human  nature  is  impersonal  (avvTro- 
(TTaTO'i).  This  much  resembles  the  theory  of  Apollinaris, 
but  Cyril  escapes  the  danger,  at  least  verbally,  by  his 
emphatic  insistence  on  the  completeness  of  the  human 
nature  assumed  by  the  Logos.  At  the  same  time,  while  he 
does  not  enter  explicitly  on  the  question — even  he  can 
still  use  (f)V(rt<;  and  uTroo-racri?  as  synonyms — Cyril  really 
heads  the  list  of  writers  who  have  held  that  the  human 
nature  of  Christ  possesses  no  independent  personality  of 
its  own,  and  is  personal  only  in  the  Logos.^  In  itself  it 
is  reduced  to  unconscious  and  impersonal  elements.  The 
step,  in  a  multitude  of  ways,  was  a  singularly  unfortunate 
one.  It  broke  decisively,  as  we  have  seen,  with  earlier 
and  better  patristic  views.  And  it  added  enormously 
to  the  difficulty  of  recognising  in  the  Christ  of  Church 
dogma  the  historic  Saviour  who  had  long  been  enshrined 
in  the  inmost  heart  of  faith,  for  no  real  meaning  could 
be  attached  to  a  human  "  nature "  which  is  not  simply 
one  aspect  of  the  concrete  life  of  a  human  person. 

Nevertheless,  it  is  a  merit  in  Cyril  not  easily  to  be 
overestimated,  that  he  strove  with  such  persistence  to  bring 
out  the  living  and  organic  unity  of  Christ's  person.  And 
here  he  was  guided  by  a  genuinely  religious  interest. 
"  This  school  of  Greek  theology  was  right,"  it  has  been 
said,  "  in  the  stress  it  laid  on  the  closest  possible  union 
of  God  with  Man  in  order  that  the  dynamic  power  of  the 

1  Quoted  by  Bonwetsch,  Grundriss,  90. 

*  His  account  of  Christ's  human  knowledge  is  unconcealed  docetism. 
There  was  really  no  ignorance,  and  could  be  none,  in  a  nature  physically 
united  to  the  Logos.  When  Christ  said  that  He  was  ignorant  of  the  day 
of  judgment,  "He  usefully  pretended  not  to  know." 


208  THE    PERSON    OF    JESUS    CHKIST 

Christ-life  might  operate  upon  the  race  whose  new  Head 
He  is  come  to  be."  ^  That  is  at  all  events  a  thoroughly 
sympathetic  verdict  on  its  deepest  motive,  and  it  explains 
much  even  in  Cyril's  view  of  the  communicatio  idiomatum, 
or  interchange  of  qualities  between  the  natures,  which 
was  later  to  become  fertile  in  so  many  unedifying 
artificialities. 

Harnack  says  roundly  that  Cyril's  theory  is  pure  but 
unintentional  Monophysitism,  Loofs,  with  more  prudence, 
remarks  that  the  question  whether  the  Christology  is  to 
be  called  Monophysite  is  after  all  a  matter  of  words. 
"  There  were  many  Mouophysites  who  thought  just  as  he 
did.  But  if  we  reserve  the  name  for  the  view  that 
Christ's  humanity  was  raised  above  humanity  even  before 
the  resurrection,  and  that  the  fna  ^vcn<;  of  Christ  was, 
so  to  speak,  the  result — by  mixture  or  addition — of  the 
evoi(TL<i,  Cyril  must  be  acquitted  of  the  charge."  ^ 

From  his  point  of  view  Cyril  naturally  attacked 
Nestorius  with  vehemence,  and  they  hurled  anathemas  at 
each  other.  Cyril  exerted  all  his  powers  to  bring  out 
the  irreligious  consequences  of  Nestorianism.  How  could 
the  sufferings  of  a  man  save  us ;  and  in  the  Eucharist  was 
it  no  more  than  human  flesh  that  we  received  ?  Eather 
at  every  point  manhood  is  blended  with  Godhead.  By 
thus  insisting  on  "  one  incarnate  nature "  Cyril  was  un- 
questionably faithful  to  the  instinct  of  Greek  Christianity. 
Ere  long  he  succeeded  in  gaining  the  adhesion  of  Celestine 
of  Eome  (430).  The  West,  alike  by  tradition  and 
temperament,  occupied  a  middle  position  between  Antioch 
and  Alexandria,  but,  having  been  long  accustomed  to 
phrases  like  de2is  natus,  deus  crucifixus  est,  it  now  leant  to 
Cyril's  emphasis  on  the  unity  of  the  Eedeemer's  person. 

Nothing  would  serve  but  the  meeting  of  another 
Council.  It  was  held  at  Ephesus  in  431,  and  takes  rank 
as  the  third  Ecumenical  Council  of  the  Church.  Suffice 
it  to  say  that  the  Cyrillians  first  deposed  Nestorius,  before 
the  .arrival  of  his  friends,  to  which  they  replied  by  deposing 
^  Dykes,  ut  sujjra,  57.  ^  Leit/aden,  293  f. 


THE  EUTYCHIAN  CONTROVERSY        209 

Cyril  and  Mcmnon  of  Ephesns.  The  Emperor  confirmed 
both  sentences,  but  that  on  Cyril  was  soon  reversed.  By 
433  court  influence  had  driven  both  parties  into  outward 
harmony,  and  Cyril  accepted  a  creed  drawn  up  in  great 
part  by  Theodoret  of  Cyrus — whose  Nestorian  sympathies 
were  strong — while  Nestorius  was  dropped  by  his  old 
supporters.  The  terms  of  this  creed  paved  the  way  for 
Chalcedon,  but  its  excessively  ambiguous  tenor  has  led 
Harnack  to  speak  of  it  as  "  the  saddest  and  most  momentous 
event  in  the  history  of  dogma  since  the  condemation  of 
Paul  of  Samosata."^  It  declared  that  Christ  was  "con- 
substantial  with  us  in  His  humanity,  for  there  has  been 
a  union  of  two  natures ;  wherefore  we  confess  one  Christ, 
one  Son,  one  Lord."  ^  Nothing  was  decided  as  to  whether 
two  natures  existed  in  Christ  after  the  incarnation.  But 
Loofs  says  truly  that  the  arrangement  in  no  way  mitigated 
the  differences  between  Cyril  and  Nestorius  on  the  question 
whether  Christ  was,  or  was  not,  an  individual  man.  For 
Cyril,  it  was  not  the  person  of  a  man  that  the  Logos  had 
assumed,  but  man,  i.e.  the  qualities  and  attributes  of 
human  nature.  This  shadowy  abstractness  of  conception 
was  only  too  certain  to  lead  men  away  from  the  historic 
life  portrayed  in  the  New  Testament. 

Henceforth  the  strength  of  the  Nestorians  lay  in 
Persia.  The  pious  barbarism  of  the  monks  flung  them 
ever  more  violently  on  the  side  of  Cyril. 

§  4.  The  Eutychian  Controversy ;  Chalcedon. — Cyril's 
death  in  444  seemed  to  bring  peace,  when  suddenly  the 
flames  of  war  shot  up  again.  They  were  kindled  by 
Eutyches,  archimandrite  of  Constantinople,  a  keen  but 
limited  and  ill-balanced  nature,  whose  piety  gave  him 
influence,  and  who  had  been  one  of  Cyril's  most  ardent 
followers.  At  a  council  in  his  own  city  he  was  accused  of 
heresy  by  Eusebius  of  Doryleeum.  He  had  certainly  used 
imprudent  phrases.  "  My  God,"  he  said,  "  is  not  of  like 
essence  with  us  " ;  the  body  of  God  could  not  be  a  man's 
1  History  of  Dogma,  iv.  197.  ^  Hahn,  §  170. 

14 


210  THE   PERSON   OP   JESUS    CHRIST 

body,  but  only  like  it ;  and  so  forth.  Opponents  of  the 
Cyrillian  theology  at  once  exclaimed  that  Eutyches  was 
only  blurting  out  what  Cyril  had  held  secretly.  In  448 
a  synod  held  at  Constantinople,  under  the  presidency 
of  his  bishop,  Flavian,  condemned  the  old  man  on  the 
charge  of  denying  the  consubstantiality  of  Christ's  human 
nature  with  ours.  In  the  circumstances,  Eutyches  drew 
back  upon  the  Christological  positions  of  his  old 
leader,  and  expressed  his  own  view  thus :  "  I  confess 
our  Lord  to  have  become  out  of  two  natures  before 
the  union.  But  I  confess  one  nature  after  the  union." 
But  he  refused  to  concede  the  orthodox  belief  that  two 
natures  existed  in  Christ  after  the  incarnation  had  taken 
place.  He  found  a  powerful  advocate  in  Dioscurus  of 
Alexandria,  an  ambitious  and  coarse-grained  ecclesiastic  who 
felt  that  the  championship  of  Eutyches  might  help  him  to 
a  kind  of  papacy  in  the  East.  On  the  other  hand,  he  was 
opposed  not  merely  by  Flavian  but  by  Leo  of  Eome,  who 
had  chosen  his  side  with  some  hesitation.  At  this  point 
the  Emperor,  with  whom  Flavian  was  no  favourite,  com- 
manded him  to  hand  in  a  confession  of  faith  justifying  his 
evil  opinion  of  Eutyches.  The  document  he  prepared  is 
of  great  interest,  as  an  anticipation  of  the  Formula  of 
Chalcedon.^  It  proved  that  men  were  beginning  to  make 
distinctions  between  "  nature "  and  "  hypostasis,"  on  the 
basis  of  which  a  reconciliation  might  be  hoped  for  between 
Alexandria  and  Antioch. 

Dioscurus,  however,  was  not  to  be  restrained,  and, 
having  persuaded  Theodosius  to  summon  a  new  council 
at  Ephesus  (449,  known  later  as  the  Eobber  Synod),  he 
presided  over  it,  and  forced  through  both  a  rehabilitation 
of  Eutyches  and  a  condemnation  and  deposition  of  the 
Antiochene  leaders.  The  Eoman  deputies  were  refused 
a  hearing.  Under  cover  of  an  appeal  to  a  resolution  of 
the  Council  of  Ephesus  in  431,  forbidding  the  addition 
of  a  new  creed  to  that  of  Niceea,  the  Union  Symbol  of  433 
was  summarily  put  aside.  Anathemas  were  pronounced 
J  Hahn,  §  223. 


leg's  dogmatic  epistle  211 

against  all  who  should  teach  that  in  Christ  there  were  two 
natures  subsequently  to  the  incarnation.  And  it  is  a  very 
arguable  position  that  Dioscurus  faithfully  represented  the 
view  really  held  by  the  majority  in  the  East. 

It  was  to  this  Council  that  Leo  of  Eome  sent  his 
famous  Dogmatic  Epistle,  which,  though  left  unread,  grew 
every  month  in  importance.  It  revived  Christological 
formulas  which  Tertullian  and  Augustine  had  made  familiar. 
"  Two  substances  or  natures  in  the  one  Christ "  is  the 
keynote.  The  substances  in  the  Incarnate  remain  what 
they  were,  but  are  combined  in  the  unity  of  the  person. 
Each  nature  preserves  intact  its  own  characteristics,  the 
lowliness  and  infirmity  of  man  being  assumed  by  the  Divine 
majesty  and  eternity.  Not  only  so,  but  in  the  Divine- 
human  life  of  the  one  person  each  nature  performs  its 
own  proper  function  in  alliance  with  the  other,  a  basis 
being  thus  found  for  Biblical  expressions  which  imply  a 
communicatio  icliomatum,  or  interchange  of  qualities ;  as 
when  it  is  said  that  the  Son  of  Man  came  down  from 
heaven  or  that  the  Son  of  God  was  crucified  and  buried. 
Leo  is  also  emphatic  as  to  the  integrity  of  our  Lord's 
manhood,  and  makes  severe  animadversions  on  the  crimi- 
nality of  Eutyches  in  denying  it  and  so  casting  the  shadow 
of  unreality  on  the  passion  which  had  been  endured  for 
our  salvation.^ 

The  Epistle  is  written  with  great  practical  wisdom  and 
insight,  the  positive  and  negative  results  of  previous 
discussions  being  lucidly  set  forth  and  sagaciously  balanced 
over  against  each  other.  Fine  shades  of  theological  dis- 
tinction are  avoided,  and  no  effort  is  made  to  follow  the 

'  The  following  are  the  most  significant  plirases :  Salva  proprietate 
utriusqne  naturae  et  substantiae  et  in  unam  coeunte  personam  suscepta  est 
a  niajestate  humilitas,  a  virtute  infirmitas  .  .  .  impassibilis  deiis  non 
dedignatus  est  homo  esse  passihilis  et  immortalis  mortis  legibus  subjacere  ; 
.  .  .  qui  enim  verus  est  deus,  idem  verus  est  homo  .  .  .  agit  utraque  forma 
cum  alterius  communione,  quod  yiroprium  est  .  .  .  propter  banc  uiiitatem 
personae  in  utraque  natura  intelligendani  et  filius  hominis  legitur  de- 
sceiidisse  de  coelo  .  .  .  et  rursus  filius  dei  cruuifixus  dieitur  ac  !>epultus. 
Cf.  Loofs,  Leitfaden,  299. 


212  THE    PERSON    OF    JESUS    CHRIST 

Greek  divines  in  subtle  or  elaborate  speculative  theories. 
On  the  whole,  Leo  comes  a  good  deal  nearer  to  the  view 
of  Antioch  than  of  Alexandria.  Still  it  is  impossible  to 
claim  him  for  either.  There  is  no  direct  refutation  of 
Nestorius,  only  of  Eutyches. 

Theodosius  died  in  July  450,  and  in  451  his  successor 
Marcian  convened  the  synod  Leo  had  asked  for,  not, 
however,  at  Eome,  but  at  Chalcedon.  It  was  the  fourth 
Ecumenical  Council  of  the  Church.  About  six  hundred 
bishops  came,  and  from  the  first  the  guidance  of  events  lay 
in  the  hands  of  the  Western  deputies.  Leo's  Epistle  was 
recognised  as  the  norm  of  orthodoxy ;  Dioscurus  deposed  ; 
Nestorianism  and  Eutychianism  condemned.  Shouts  were 
heard  from  the  assembly :  "We  all  believe  as  Leo  does." 
The  inviolability  of  the  creeds  of  Nicsea  and  Ephesus  was 
reaffirmed,  and  thereafter  the  Council  set  forth  the 
following  definition : — 

'ETTOfxevoi,  TOLVvv  Tot?  dyLot<i  TraTpdcriv  eva  /cal  rov  avrov 
OfjLoXoyeLV  vlov  rov  Kvptov  rj/xcov  'Irjaovv  Xpiarov  av/j,cj)(ovoi)^ 
aTravre<i  eKSoBdaKOfiev,  rekeiov  rov  avrov  ev  deorrjrc  Kal 
reXeiov  rov  avrov  ev  dvOpoiTrorrjri,  Oeov  dXrj6(ii)<;  Kal 
avOpoiirov  aX7]6a)<i  rov  avrov,  €K  ■^f%'}?  Xo7i«:>}9  Kal 
(Tco/J,aro<i,  Ofjioovaiov  rw  irarpl  Kara  rijv  deorr^ra  Kal 
OfxoovaLOv  rov  avrov  r]jMV  Kara  rrjv  dvOpMTrorrjra  .  .  .  €V 
8vo  (f)uaeaiv  davj'x^vroi'i,  drpeiTTOi'i,  dhiaiperoi<i,  a^^^oipiaroyi 
'yvMpi^Ofievov  '  ovSafiov  r/}?  rcov  (pvaecov  Sia(popd'^  dvrjprjfievr]^ 
8id  rr)v  evoiaiv,  aM^o/nevrj^;  8e  fiaXXov  ri)^  IStorijro^ 
eKarepa<i  (^ycreco?  Kal  et?  ev  irpocroiTTOv  Kal  fiiav  inroaraaiv 
avvrpe'^ovar]^} 

^  "Therefore  following  the  holy  fathers  we  all  with  one  consent  teach 
men  to  confess  one  and  the  same  Son,  our  Lord  Jesus  Christ,  the  same 
perfect  in  Godhead  and  the  sanie  perfect  in  manhood,  truly  God  and  the 
same  truly  man,  of  a  rational  soul  and  body,  co-essential  with  the  Father 
according  to  the  Godhead,  and  co-essential  with  us  according  to  the  manhood 
...  to  be  acknowledged  in  two  natures,  without  confusion,  without 
mutation,  witliout  division,  without  separation  ;  the  distinction  of  natures 
being  by  no  means  taken  away  by  the  union,  but  rather  the  property  of 
each  nature  being  preserved  and  concurring  in  one  person  and  one 
hypostasis."     For  the  text,  see  Hahn,  §  146. 


THE    CHALCEDOKIAN    CREED  213 

In  tlie  main  this  was  a  document  approximating 
closely  to  the  theology  of  Cyril ;  but  the  phrase  "  in  two 
natures  "  proves  that  at  a  critical  point  Western  influences 
had  triumphed,  for  as  it  now  stood  the  clause  satisfied  only 
the  Antiochenes  and  a  few  friends  of  the  Union  Symbol  of 
433.  Still,  both  Cyril  and  Leo  had  been  acknowledged 
as  authoritative.  Obviously  the  framers  of  the  definition 
wished  not  so  much  to  formulate  a  theory  of  Christ's 
person  as  to  bar  out  extreme  statements  on  either  side. 
Hence  the  famous  four  adverbs,  fixing  the  two  natures  rela- 
tively to  one  another,  are  all  negative.  At  the  same  time 
the  unity  of  the  person  is  positively  emphasised,  as  may 
have  been  done  already  in  the  Athanasian  Creed  (which 
is  perhaps  earlier) :  units  Christus,  non  con/vsiune  sub- 
stantiarum,  sed  imitate  personae}  In  the  last  resort  a 
clearly  felt  soteriological  interest  is  behind  the  careful 
phrases,  and  enables  us  to  interpret  the  whole  as  a 
combination  of  the  vital  elements  which  faith  has  always 
insisted  on  combining  in  its  view  of  Christ  the  Saviour. 
Thus  the  reality  and  integrity  of  each  nature,  of  Godhead 
and  of  manhood,  is  upheld ;  the  incarnation  has  not  issued 
in  a  being  that  is  somehow  neither  Divine  nor  human,  or 
either  exclusively.  On  the  other  hand,  the  theauthropic 
Life  is  a  personal  unity,  not  severed  into  two  independent 
subjects,  but  hypostatically  one.  Thus  the  decisions  of 
Chalcedon  may  reasonably  be  viewed  as  a  great  utterance 
of  faith,  aware  of  the  wrong  turnings  which  theory  may 
take  so  easily.  They  have  been  well  compared  to  buoys 
anchored  along  a  difficult  estuary,  on  the  right  and  left, 
to  guide  the  ship  of  truth.  With  the  religion  of  the 
Creed,  accordingly,  we  have  no  quarrel. 

But  with  its  theology  it  is  otherwise.  As  Dorner  has 
remarked,  it  is  mere  short-sightedness  to  imagine  that 
the  Christology  of  that  age,  which  could  operate  with 
ideas  of  God  and  man  only  in  the  form  in  which  they  were 
then  current,  took  shape  in  determinations  which  need  no 
amendment,  and  admit  of  none.  As  a  theory  or  doctrine, 
^  Cf.  Bonwetsch,  Grundriss,  93. 


214  THE   PERSON   OF   JESUS   CHRIST 

therefore,  the  formula  of  Chalcedon  is  susceptible  of 
criticism.  Thus  it  may  be  pointed  out  that  Christological 
relations  which,  in  essence,  are  ethical  and  personal,  have 
been  too  much  expressed  in  terms  imbued  with  a 
certain  mechanical  and  even  material  flavour.  This  is 
particularly  true  of  the  term  "  nature "  ((f)V(Ti<;),  which 
is  not  an  ethical  word  at  all.  Now  non-ethical  realities 
admit  of  no  true  unity ;  hence  we  are  not  surprised  to 
find  that  Godhead  and  manhood  are  contemplated  here 
as  being  in  essence  so  disparate,  so  utterly  unrelated 
and  heterogeneous,  that  a  miracle  of  sheer  omnipotence 
is  needed  to  unite  them.  Love,  it  is  true,  is  behind 
the  incarnation,  and  gives  it  its  significance,  but  the 
methods  by  which  this  love  accomplishes  its  purpose  are 
not  sufficiently  conceived  as  spiritual,  with  the  result 
that  from  the  first  Christ's  true  humanity  is  overshadowed, 
if  not  indeed  seriously  curtailed.  So  that  objections 
may  be  raised  to  the  resultant  doctrine  from  two  quite 
opposite  points  of  view.  In  the  first  place,  it  awakens 
suspicion  by  its  dualism,  by  its  blank  unrelieved  insist- 
ence upon  the  eternal  parallelism  of  two  "  natures "  set 
in  a  relation  to  each  other  which  after  all  is  ethically 
unmediated — scarcely  less  so  than  in  the  theory  of 
Nestorius.  God  and  man  are  yoked  together,  not  exhibited 
in  the  singleness  of  personal  life.  That  this  was  the 
preponderating  tendency  of  Chalcedonian  Christology  is 
proved  by  the  Dyophysite  and  Dyothelite  findings  of 
the  next  three  hundred  years,  and  against  this  tendency 
Monophysitism  offered  a  valuable  protest,  so  far,  by  con- 
tending that  all  that  is  Divine  in  Christ  is  human, 
and  all  that  is  human,  Divine.  Nothing  else  represents 
the  unity  of  impression  made  by  the  historic  Jesus. 
Secondly,  the  unity  which  Chalcedon  nevertheless  affirms 
is  a  purely  marvellous  one — a  mere  wonder,  a  thing  in- 
expressible in  genuinely  spiritual  terms,  the  humanity  so 
reduced  to  a  mere  selfless  "  organ "  of  the  Divine  Word 
that  it  becomes  impossible  to  think  this  Christ  as  the  Head 
of  a  new  redeemed  race  of  men  and  Himself  the  Pattern 


MONOPHYSITISM  215 

Man.  From  this  point  of  view  the  strictures  of  Principal 
Dykes  are  hardly  too  severe.  "A  Being,"  he  writes, 
"  who  combines  in  an  inscrutable  fashion  Divine  with 
human  properties,  and  of  whom  consequently  contradictory 
assertions  can  be  made,  whose  single  Person  is  Divine, 
while  His  dual  natures  hold  an  undefined  relation  to  one 
another:  this  is  not  a  scheme  to  satisfy  either  head  or 
heart.  It  is  but  the  bare  skeleton  of  a  dogma,  in  which 
one  cannot  readily  recognise  either  the  Jesus  of  the  Gospels 
or  the  Christ  of  the  Church's  worship."  ^ 

Thus  the  Council  did  not  so  much  reconcile  or 
synthesise  the  opposing  theories  put  before  it,  as  conceal 
their  opposition  under  extremely  careful  phrases.  But 
when  the  Creed  had  to  be  interpreted,  would  it  be 
read  in  the  light  of  Cyril's  teaching,  or  Theodoret's,  or 
Leo's?  2  All  three  were  grammatically  possible;  which 
should  rank  as  correct  was  to  be  the  problem  of  the  next 
century. 

§  5.  Tlie  Monophysite  and  Monothelite  Controversies. — In 
point  of  fact  the  Chalcedouian  decisions  had  at  first  a 
nearly  fatal  influence  on  the  Eastern  Church.  Instead  of 
peace  the  Council  brought  a  sword,  for  Dyophysites  and 
Monophysites  counted  each  other  the  worst  of  heretics. 
There  were  risings  in  Egypt,  Palestine,  and  Syria.  The 
monks  refused  to  take  their  theology  from  Piome.  We 
cannot  pursue  the  details  of  this  miserable  conflict,  but  we 
note  one  or  two  landmarks  which  obtrude  themselves  on  a 
rapid  survey.  Kriiger  has  adverted  to  a  curious  parallel 
between  the  course  of  Arianism  and  Monophysitism,  utterly 
unlike  as  the  two  movements  were  in  religious  motive.  If 
Lucian  was  father  of  the  one  heresy,  Apollinaris  was  father 
of  the  other.  If  the  Arians  appealed  to  Origen,  the 
Monophysites  appealed  to  Cyril.  And  as  it  required  a 
race  of  thinkers  trained  by  Origen  to  secure  the  triumph 

1  Expository  Times,  October  1905,  10.     On  the  whole  .suhject,  cf.  Dorner, 
Entwicklangsgeschiclde  der  Lehre  von  der  Person  Chiisti,  ii.  144-49. 
^  Loofs,  Leilfaden,  3J1. 


216  THE   PERSON    OF   JESUS    CHRIST 

of  Nicsea,  so  too  it  was  only  by  the  efforts  of  men  who 
had  gone  back  to  the  Christology  of  Cyril  that  permanent 
recognition  was  gained  for  Chalcedon,  in  so  far  as  it  was 
gained  at  all.^ 

The  watchword  of  the  Monophysite  party  was  the 
Cyrillian  formula,  ixia  <^ucrt?  tov  \oyov  deov  aeaapKWfxevrj. 
Starting  from  the  concrete  unity  of  the  Divine-human 
Christ,  within  which  two  natures  can  be  discriminated 
only  in  theory,  they  contended  like  the  Nestorians  that 
"  nature "  and  "  person "  are  equivalent,  or  at  all  events 
coincident  ideas.  And  since  the  general  (Godhead,  man- 
hood) exists  only  in  the  form  of  concrete  personality, 
never  merely  in  the  abstract,  it  follows  that  to  say  "  two 
natures  "  is  tantamount  to  saying  "  two  persons,"  that  is,  to 
pure  Nestorianism.  What  has  offended  the  Church  in 
Monophysitism  has  not  been  so  much  these  presuppositions, 
— -in  which  from  one  point  of  view  there  is  nothing 
objectionable — as  rather  the  docetism  which  Monophysites 
from  Cyril  to  Julian  never  succeeded  in  shaking  off.  The 
following  points  are  important :  ^ — 

(a)  In  the  Monophysite  Christology  two  diverging 
tendencies  appeared.  These  are  represented  by  the 
Severians  and  the  Julianists,  so  named  from  their  leaders, 
Severus  of  Antioch  and  Julius  of  Halicarnassus.  It  was 
the  aim  of  the  Severians  to  distinguish  Godhead  and  man- 
hood ideally  within  the  one  Christ.  So  they  accentuated 
the  unmingledness  of  the  natures,  together  with  the 
creaturely  and  mortal  character  of  our  Lord's  humanity, 
and  even  drew  attention  to  limitations  in  the  knowledge 
of  Jesus.  At  the  same  time  they  repudiated  the  Chal- 
cedonian  iv  Svo  ^vaeaiv,  and  especially  Leo's  insistence  on 
the  (so  to  speak)  private  and  independent  activity  of  each 
nature,  an  interpretation  which  they  judged  to  be  no  better 
than  Nestorianism.  Their  real  interest  lay  in  affirming 
a  single  Divine-human  subject,  a  ^vai<i  koX  vTroaraat'i 
OeauBpiKij.       On    the    other  hand,    the    Julianists,    while 

*  Das  Dogma  von  der  Dreieinigkeit,  230. 
'  Cf.  Harnack,  Orundriss,  §  43. 


MONOPHYSITISM  217 

denying  that  the  manliood  of  Christ  was  totally  absorbed 
in  the  Godhead,  still  maintained  that  His  human  nature 
was  not  as  that  of  other  men.  Transmuted  by  its 
contact  with  deity,  it  was  incorruptible,  glorified,  and  even 
uncreate,  not  merely  after  the  resurrection,  but  from  the 
very  moment  of  assumption.  Hence  the  passibility  of 
Christ  is  no  mere  natural  attribute  of  His  being  man ;  it 
rests  at  every  point  on  His  free  will. 

(b)  In  order  to  maintain  the  unity  of  the  Empire, 
repeated  attempts  of  a  political  kind  were  made  to  sup- 
press the  Chalcedonian  Creed.  Thus  Basiliscus  the  Usurper 
cancelled  it  by  his  Eucyclicon  in  476,  and  in  482  the 
conciliatory  Zeno  attempted  in  his  famous  Henoticon  to 
evade  its  terms,  declaring  that  while  the  Son  of  God  was 
co-essential  with  the  Father  in  deity  and  co-essential  with 
us  in  manhood,  yet  He  was  one,  not  two,  the  miracles 
and  the  sufferings  being  predicable  of  the  same  subject. 
This  was  a  direct  blow  at  the  authority  of  Leo,  and  a 
thirty-five  years'  schism  with  Eome  was  the  result.  But  in 
519  the  Henoticon  was  once  more  cast  aside,  and  the  Creed 
of  Chalcedon,  which  had  come  meanwhile  to  be  invested 
with  the  sanctity  of  tradition,  was  restored.  The  so-called 
Theopaschite  controversy,  which  sprang  up  over  the  phrase 
6  aravpoide\<i  hi  Tj/j,a<i,  inserted  by  Peter  the  Fuller  in  the 
Trishagion,  showed  how  unwilling  the  West  even  now 
was  to  interpret  Chalcedon  in  a  Cyrillian  sense,  whereas 
the  East  would  hear  of  no  other.  It  was  the  strong 
hand  of  Justinian  (527—565)  that  lifted  the  definition  of 
451  into  permanent  supremacy.  To  please  the  Mono- 
physites,  Theodore  of  Mopsuestia  and  Theodoret  were 
condemned. 

(c)  In  the  sixth  century  the  defenders  of  Chalce- 
donian orthodoxy  are  obviously  men  of  marked  intellectual 
power.  Aristotelian  metaphysic  supplied  good  weapons. 
The  most  conspicuous  name  is  that  of  Leontius  of  Byzan- 
tium (c.  485—543),  forerunner  of  John  of  Damascus; 
a  lover  of  severe  philosophic  categories  whose  influence 
on  the   Christolo^ical    evolution   is    of    real    historic    im- 


218  THE    PERSON    OF   JESUS    CHRIST 

poitance.  Eetaiuing  the  distinction  between  "  nature " 
and  "  person,"  he  took  the  Formula  of  Chalcedon  on 
the  whole  in  a  Cjrillian  sense.  The  human  nature  of 
Christ  is  not  strictly  impersonal,  nor  on  the  other  hand 
does  it  possess,  as  the  Antiochenes  held,  an  independent 
personality  or  centre  of  the  conscious  moral  life ;  it  is 
ivvTToaTaTO'i,  i.e.  it  has  personality  only  in  and  through 
the  Logos.  By  the  aid  of  this  finer  species  of  Apollin- 
arianism,  Leontius  was  able  to  maintain  both  that  an 
exchange  of  qualities  obtained  between  the  two  natures 
and  that  each  nature  has  its  own  "  energy,"  as  Leo  had 
affirmed  in  his  Epistle.  Harnack  well  names  Leontius 
"  the  father  of  the  new  Christological  orthodoxy,  as  the 
Cappadocians  had  been  fathers  of  the  new  Trinitarian 
orthodoxy."  ^  He  is  the  first  scholastic.  His  conception 
of  the  "  enhypostasia "  or  impersonality  of  Christ's  man- 
hood was  new  only  in  formula ;  but  as  a  fornmla  it  was 
new,  and  in  theological  history  the  power  of  formulas  has 
been  immense. 

(d)  At  last,  in  553,  when  the  fifth  Ecumenical 
Council  met  in  Constantinople,  victory  rested  with  the 
orthodoxy  which  read  Chalcedon  in  the  sense  of  Cyril. 
The  decisions  now  formulated  were  meant  to  make  an 
Antiochene  interpretation  of  the  Creed  for  ever  impossible. 
Christ  is  one ;  and  of  this  one  Christ  both  miracles  and 
sufferings  must  be  predicated.  The  two  natures  are  dis- 
tinguishable only  in  theory.  The  Logos  was  also  man,  but 
in  the  historic  Christ  there  existed  no  human  personality. 
"  Here  in  Constantinople  the  Christology  of  the  Ancient 
Church  readied  its  conclusion."  ^  But  the  triumph  of 
Cyril,  though  it  satisfied  the  instincts  of  Eastern  faith, 
failed  to  reconcile  the  Monophysites.  Their  Churches 
remain  to  this  day. 

The  two  parties,  aa  Dorner  observes,  were  not  in 
the  last  resort  so  far  apart  as  they  supposed.  "  The 
Monophysites  only  represent  the  effort  to  attain  a  more 
inward  unity  of  the  natures  than  the  Chalcedonians,  but 

»  Grandriss,  207.  ^  Loofs,  EK  iv.  52. 


THE    MONOTHELITES  219 

can  do  as  little  as  their  opponents  to  prove  the  inner 
cohesive  affinity  of  the  Divine  and  the  human.  The 
Chalcedonians,  on  the  other  hand,  represent  the  effort  to 
secure  a  true  and  relatively  independent  humanity,  without 
confusion  or  conversion ;  but  fundamentally — although 
declining  to  admit  it — they  really  fail  to  transcend  the 
Monophysite  view  that  the  human  becomes  hypostatic 
only  in  the  Divine."  ^ 

It  remains  to  treat  shortly  of  the  Monothelite  con- 
troversy, the  ethical  sequel  of  that  whicli  we  have 
just  surveyed,  and  due  to  political  attempts  at  union. 
Thus  far  nothing  had  been  determined  as  to  volition 
in  Christ,  and  the  terms  of  Chalcedon  could  be  read 
either  way.  Harnack  says  that  in  point  of  fact  nobody 
had  spoken  of  two  wills  in  Christ  prior  to  the  sixth 
century,  not  even  the  Antiochenes.^  The  question 
now  became  a  burning  one.  Sergius,  patriarch  of  Con- 
stantinople, advised  the  reigning  Emperor  Heraclius  to 
issue  the  formula  (about  630)  that  the  one  Christ  had 
wrought  all  things  by  a  single  Divine-human  energy  {jxla 
deavBptKTJ  evepyeLo).  This  was  meant  as  a  sop  to  the 
Monophysites,  and  met  with  considerable  success  in  Egypt. 
But  opposition  came  from  Sophronius,  afterwards  bishop 
of  Jerusalem.  The  consequence  was  a  second  royal  edict 
(the  "EKdeat<;  Tr/o-reco?  of  638),  inspired  by  Sergius  and 
Honorius  of  Eome,  and  affirming  the  existence  of  a  single 
will  in  Christ.  The  minor  question  of  one  or  two  "  energies  " 
was  brushed  aside  as  unscriptural.  On  this  the  West 
blazed  up  in  revolt,  and  even  in  the  East  divines  like 
Maximus  Confessor  flung  themselves  ardently  into  the 
defence  of  a  position  which  they  held  to  be  only  a 
corollary  of  the  two  natures  affirmed  at  Chalcedon.  Two 
natures  implied  two  faculties  of  volition.  Fearing  a 
revolution,  the  Emperor  Constans  II.  issued  in  648  the 
notorious  rescript  entitled  T6tto<;  T179  iriareoi^,  prohibiting 
all  discussion  of  the  subject.  But  its  influence  proved 
small,  and  feeling  was  intensified  by  cruel  measures  taken 
^  Enlwicklungsgcschichle,  ii.  189.  *  Grundriss,  209. 


220  THE    PERSON    OF   JESUS    CHRIST 

against  Martin  of  Eome.  The  Emperor  was  murdered 
in  668,  and  after  some  years  his  successor  Constantine 
Pogonatus  saw  his  way  to  combine  with  the  Pope  in 
taking  a  more  conciliatory  position.  In  680  the  sixth 
Ecumenical  Council  gathered  at  Constantinople ;  and 
there,  on  the  basis  of  a  communication  from  Agathon  of 
Eome  obviously  modelled  on  Leo's  Epistle,  the  Dyothelite 
position  was  explicitly  affirmed.  The  exact  terms  by 
which  the  relation  of  the  natures  had  been  defined  at 
Chalcedon  are  now  carried  over  to  the  relation  of  the 
wills.  In  Christ,  it  is  declared,  are  two  natural  wills 
and  two  natural  energies  (modes  of  activity),  the  human 
will  not  being  opposed  to  the  Divine,  but  rather  obedient 
and  subordinate  to  its  omnipotence.  Thus  the  dualism 
is  asserted  in  its  sharpest  form,  as  implying  two 
parallel  series  of  volitions  and  activities,  while  yet  it  is 
added,  with  seeming  inconsistency,  that  the  almighty 
will  of  the  Logos  so  conditions  the  will  distinctive  of 
the  humanity  as  wholly  to  absorb  its  independence  and 
self  -  motion.  Maximus  had  tried  to  bridge  the  gulf 
between  the  two  wills  by  suggesting  that  the  pure 
human  soul  is  in  itself  godlike,  akin  to  the  Logos  ethically 
and  in  essence ;  but  his  suggestions  came  to  nothing. 
In  the  East  the  Monophysite  habit  of  thought  persisted  ; 
for  even  if  the  Western  interpretation  of  Chalcedon  had 
triumphed  formally,  yet  the  ideas  of  Apollinaris  and 
Cyril  retained  vitality,  and  held  a  place  firmly  in  the 
now  official  conception  of  the  impersonality  of  Christ's 
manhood. 

So  much  for  the  outward  features  of  the  conflict ; 
let  us  glance  at  the  theological  motives  operating 
beneath  the  surface.  Both  sides  of  course  started  from 
the  accepted  doctrine  of  two  natures  in  one  person. 
But  within  this  complex  whole  the  Monothelites  began 
from  the  unity  of  the  person,  the  Dyothelites  from  the 
duality  of  the  natures.  If  one  party  referred  the  will  to 
the  personal  Ego  in  Christ,  the  other  held  with  equal 
conviction    that    it    forms    part  of    each    "  nature."     The 


MONOTHELITES    AND    DYOTHELITES  221 

Monothclitcs  fetired  Nestorianism — the  combination  of  a 
fallible  with  an  infallible  will — and  preferred  to  think  of 
Christ's  humanity  as  being  related  to  the  Logos  as  the 
body  is  to  the  soul.  For  them  the  unity  of  will  had  a  vast 
religious  significance.  "  We  conclude,"  writes  Theodore 
of  Pharan,  their  leading  representative,  "  that  all  that  tchich 
ice  hear  from  Christ  and  helieve  is  the  work  of  God  .  .  . 
from  beginning  to  end  the  whole  incarnation  is  one  truly 
high  and  Divine  activity."  ^  At  this  point,  however,  our 
sympathy  is  checked  by  Theodore's  inveterate  tendency  to 
docetism,  manifested,  for  example,  in  the  statement  that 
our  Lord's  sense-experience  at  each  moment  was  evoked  by 
no  natural  necessity  but  by  His  Divine  volition.  It  was 
this  docetism  which  lent  power  to  the  Dyothelite  counter- 
argument. Over  and  over  again  it  is  insisted  that  a 
nature  without  a  will  is  nothing;  that  if  Christ  was  man. 
He  must  have  been  man  willing  and  active.  One  composite 
will  is  inconceivable.  Only  through  His  human  will  could 
Jesus  finish  the  work  given  Him  to  do.  Faith,  love,  hope 
and  all  the  virtues  are  only  possible  for  one  in  whom  they 
are  the  outcome  of  real  spontaneity ;  unless  He  were 
endowed  with  a  human  faculty  of  volition,  and  were  thus 
humanly  free,  Christ  could  not  be  our  pattern.  Here  also 
a  true  religious  interest  is  at  work. 

Each  party,  it  is  manifest,  had  taken  possession  of 
one  aspect  of  the  truth.  As  the  question  was  then 
stated,  each  had  much  to  say  for  itself,  and  had  no  need 
to  fear  the  other's  refutation.  The  philosophic  reader 
will  be  apt  to  say  that  no  advance  was  possible  till  the 
relation  of  the  will  to  the  personality,  the  centre  of 
conscious  moral  experience,  had  been  thought  out  more 
clearly,  and  the  idea  of  personality  itself  submitted  to  a 
more  exact  analysis.  On  the  other  hand,  the  basis  of 
doctrine  in  past  facts  had  been  virtually  abandoned,  and 
it  was  necessary  to  recover  vital  touch  with  the  historic 
Jesus.  "  "What  this  Christology  handed  over  to  the 
Church  was   not  a  finished    result    but  a  problem — that 

^  Baur,  DreieinigJceit,  ii.   109. 


222  THE    PERSON    OF    JESUS    CHRIST 

God  Himself  should  have  lived  and  walked  here,  a  man 
like  to  us."  1 

Finally,  a  brief  reference  is  due  to  John  of  Damascus 
(died  probably  before  754),  to  whom  the  theology  of  the 
Greek  Church  owes  its  definitive  systematic  form.  He 
taught  that  the  two  natures  in  Christ  interpenetrate  each 
other  like  fire  and  iron  (jrepi'^MpTja-L^),  with  an  ensuing 
exchange  of  qualities.  He  laid  stress,  moreover,  on  the 
"  Enhypostasia "  of  the  manhood,^  thus  perpetuating,  in 
spite  of  the  Dyophysite  and  Dyothelite  creeds,  a  view 
that  has  many  points  of  affinity  with  Apollinaris.  The 
Logos  is  placed  as  head  on  the  mere  trunk  of  humanity. 
But  in  neither  respect  was  he  original.  What  he  offers 
us  is  rather  a  scholastic  elaboration  of  results  attained 
by  the  Cappadocians  and  by  Leontius  of  Byzantium. 
Development  had  stopped  with  the  Council  of  553,  and 
John  was  merely  "  the  registrar  of  Greek  orthodoxy." 
And  thus  by  degrees  the  Church's  memories  of  the 
human  life  of  Jesus  faded  into  oblivion.  Men  lost  the 
sense  of  history.  Nothing  had  happened  at  the  incar- 
nation save  that  Godhead  assumed  a  new  relationship, 
took  a  new  organ,  began  to  work  at  a  new  place.  Nor 
was  the  situation  bettered  by  the  bravely  persistent 
instinct  of  revolt  against  dualism,  for  this  only  meant 
that  one  aspect  of  the  double  Life  is  swallowed  up  indis- 
tinguishably  in  the  other.  Christ's  deity  is  seen  as 
"  loosely  attached  to  His  human  nature,  yet  overbearing  it, 
and  reducing  to  little  better  than  a  phantasm  the  moral 
victories  and  pathetic  conflicts  of  His  earthly  career."  ^ 

1  Seeberg,  Lehrbuch  d.  DO.  (1895),  i.  231. 

^  Since  the  Logos  forms  the  personality  in  Christ,  He  prayed   not  for 
Himself  but  as  an  example  to  us, 
*  Dykes,  ut  su^ra,  59. 


CHAPTER   VI. 

LATER  CHRISTOLOGY  IN  THE  WEST. 

Augustine  and  the  Middle  Ages. — Henceforward  we  shall 
be  engaged  solely  with  Western  thought,  for  in  the 
East  theology  had  sunk  into  petrified  inaction.  Even 
of  the  Latin  Church  it  may  be  said  that  it  was  more 
occupied  with  the  means  of  salvation  than  with  the 
person  of  the  Saviour.^  The  creed  functioned  as  a 
legal  mystery,  which  no  one  outside  the  great  Church 
could  understand.  Speculation,  accordingly,  was  kept 
within  narrow  bounds.  From  the  eighth  century  to  the 
sixteenth  not  a  single  contribution  of  real  importance 
was  made.  As  in  earlier  times,  Western  divines  proved 
skilful  rather  to  register  and  formulate  the  ecumenical 
decisions  than  to  serve  as  pathfinders  in  new  fields 
of  truth.  One  exception  may  be  named  in  Hilary  of 
Poictiers  (d.  367),  who  developed  an  impressionist  view 
which  has  been  interpreted  as  akin  to  modern  Kenotio 
theories,  but  its  influence  on  the  course  of  thought  is 
negligible. 

Even  Augustine  (354-430)  is  scarcely  to  be  desig- 
nated an  original  or  creative  mind  in  the  realm  of 
Christology ;   he  impresses  rather  by  the  amazing  verbal 

Literature — Scheel,  Die  Anschauung  Augustins  iiber  Christi  Person 
iind  Werk,  1901  ;  Gottschick,  article  "  Augustins  Anschauungen  von  der 
Erloserwirknngen  Christi,"  ^TA".  1901;  MoUer,  article  "  Adoptianisinus," 
RE.  i.  ;  Ritschl,  History  of  the  Doctrine  of  Justification  and  Heconcil iation, 
1872;  Schultz,  Die  Lehre  von  dcr  Gotthcit  Christi,  1881  ;  Foley,  Ansebn's 
Theorxj  of  the,  Atonement,  1909  ;  Keaiider,  Church  History ;  Secberg,  Die 
Theologie  des  Joh.  Duns  Scolus,  1900. 

*  Eeville,  Hidory  of  the  Dogma  of  the  Deity  of  Jesus  Christ,  158, 


224  THE    PERSON    OF   JESUS    CHRIST 

and  dialectical  ability  with  which  he  reproduced  the 
accepted  doctrines  of  the  Church.^  Biblical  and  orthodox 
ideas  gradually  mastered  him,  but  he  never  quite  flung 
off  the  early  influences  of  Neo-Platonism,  and  these  in- 
clined him,  at  each  stage  of  his  development,  to  define 
the  Son  as  identical  with  the  Neo-Platonic  vov^  or 
Wisdom ;  yet  without  any  of  the  subordinatiouism  to 
which  a  similar  path  had  conducted  Origen.  In  his 
mature  period,  however,  he  insists  that  the  man  Jesus 
had  been  conjoined  with  God  the  Logos  in  such  a  unity, 
"  that  it  is  the  same  Son  of  God  who  is  Son  of  Man,  the 
same  Son  of  Man  who  is  Son  of  God."^  The  conception 
by  which  he  resolves  all  difficulties  is  the  distinction — 
in  reality  very  old — between  the  forma  Dei  and  the 
forma  servi ;  a  distinction  not  to  be  hastily  equated 
with  that  between  the  two  natures.  In  terms,  of  course, 
this  contrast  of  "  forms  "  is  taken  from  Ph  2  ;  but  while 
St.  Paul  describes  our  Lord  as  having  abandoned  the  one 
mode  of  being  for  the  other,  Augustine  regards  them 
as  co-existent  {non  formam  Dei  amittens,  sed  formam 
servi  accipiens).  It  is  curiously  hard  to  say  whether 
Augustine's  sympathies  were  more  with  the  East  or 
West.  On  the  one  hand,  his  tendency  is  to  conceive 
Godhead  and  manhood  as  self-evidently  exclusive  of 
each  other,  thus  keeping  the  two  natures  apart,  and 
in  this  view,  which  on  the  whole  predominates,  he 
follows  Ambrose.  This  made  it  possible  to  regard  the 
humanity  of  Christ  as  constituting  an  independent  moral 
subject,  genuinely  human  in  its  growth  and  progress, 
and  Augustine  did  not  even  shrink  from  declaring  that 
Christ's  humanity — like  the  elect  everywhere — was  the 
object  of  Divine  predestination.  His  Mediatorship  rests 
on  His  participation  in  manhood  {mediator  non  quia 
deus  sed  quia  homo).  It  is  perhaps  a  one-sided  esti- 
mate of  this  element  which  leads  Harnack  to  remark  that 

^  On   the  -whole   subject,    cf.    Scheel's   full   and   able   monograph,   Die 
Anscliauung  Augustins  iiber  Christi  Person  und  Werk  (Tubingen,  1901). 
^  Ihichir.  c.  40. 


AUGCSTINE  225 

Augustine's  profoundest  inteiesi  "centred  in  the  human 
soul  of  Jesus."  ^  On  the  other  hand,  his  more  explicit 
statements  are  in  line  with  Athanasius,  and  share  in  the 
Cyrillian  docetism.  In  the  God-man  the  personal  factor 
is  supplied  by  God  the  Word ;  the  assumed  human  nature 
is  deified,  wliile  the  Word  remains  metaphysically  un- 
changeable, and  nothing  like  a  commixtio  is  really  possible. 
But  for  the  ends  of  popular  exposition,  he  is  accustomed 
to  say  that  Jesus  Christ  is  man  and  God  in  one  person, 
as  each  of  us  is  flesh  and  spirit.  Obviously  this  analogy, 
if  pressed,  would  have  led  straight  back  to  Apollinarian- 
ism,  of  which  Augustine  was  a  lifelong  and  passionate 
opponent.  But  the  phrase  is  none  the  less  a  symptom. 
It  fits  in  with  the  increasing  Western  tendency  to  speak 
of  Christ's  "  flesh "  or  "  body,"  rather  than  of  Christ  the 
man.  Most  of  these  ideas  received  symbolic  expression 
later  in  the  so-called  Athanasian  Creed,  which  first  comes 
into  view  near  the  end  of  the  seventh  century. 

In  Spain  the  older  Augustinian  tradition  lived  on  for 
centuries,  in  contrast  to  the  semi-Mouophysite  reading  of 
Chalcedon,  which  had  become  orthodox  by  the  lapse  of 
time.  Westerns  used  and  loved  the  phrase  Christus  deus 
et  homo ;  and  it  hardly  seemed  inconsistent  with  this  that 
in  the  eighth  century  Elipandus  of  Toledo  and  Felix  of 
Urgel  should  have  begun  to  teach  that  the  human  nature 
combined  with  the  deity  of  the  Redeemer  was  not  at 
once  taken  up  into  the  essential  unity  of  the  Divine 
person,  and  consequently  had  no  direct  share  in  the 
Divine  Sonship,  but  was  only  Son  of  God  adoptively. 
Thus  a  line  in  the  Spanish  liturgy  speaks  of  the  pas4o 
fdii  adoptixi.  Hence,  too,  the  name  Adoptianism.  In  the 
fight  with  Arianism  it  had  been  customary  to  maintain 
that  Christ  was  Son  natura,  non  adoptione ;  and  the  new 
view,  ill-informed  as  its  phrases  were,  was  meant  as  a 
corrective  of  orthodox  extravagances  which  might  over- 
shadow the  real  humanity.  Elipandus  may  well  have  felt 
the  old  influence  of  Antioch.  But  Charlemagne  inter- 
^  Hist,  of  Dogma,  v.  128. 
15 


226  THE    PERSON    OF   JESUS    CHRIST 

posed,  and  Adoptianism  was  condemned  at  the  Synod 
of  Regensburg  in  792  and  twice  later,  Alcuin  being  its 
keenest  foe.  It  was  urged  that,  like  the  Nestorians,  the 
Adoptianists  held  a  double  personality  in  Christ ;  but  it 
is  worth  noting  that  in  refuting  their  errors  Alcuin  went 
so  far  as  to  say,  in  adsumptione  carnis  a  deo  persona 
perit  hominis,  non  natura.  This  persona  perit  hominis 
left  even  the  orthodoxy  of  Cyril  behind,  and  meant  that 
the  strict  two-nature  doctrine  was  consistent  with,  not 
to  say  demanded,  a  wholly  impersonal  conception  of 
what  manhood  in  Christ  is.  The  formula  of  Chalcedon 
was  in  fact  ill  adapted  to  express  the  Western  idea  of 
redemption,  and  Adoptianism  proved  it.  One  who  in 
His  true  humanity  should  be  the  normal  subject  of 
moral  life,  and  should  atone  by  a  real  passion  for  sin, 
as  Head  of  the  Church  and  Brother  of  the  redeemed — 
this,  and  nothing  less,  was  felt  to  be  indispensable  if 
guilt  were  to  be  abolished  and  holiness  made  a  possibility. 
Adoptianism  was  easy  to  refute,  but  it  betokened  grave 
defects  in  the  received  doctrine. 

The  dogma  of  transubstantiation,  now  rising  into  view, 
was  a  new  and  powerful  influence  tending  to  annihilate 
the  true  humanity  of  Christ.  One  can  discern  a  certain 
parallelism  between  the  view  that  the  human  factor  in 
our  Lord  had  as  such  no  personality,  but  was  personal 
only  in  and,  as  it  were,  under  the  Logos,  and  the  later 
controversy  as  to  whether  in  the  Eucharist  the  substance 
of  bread  and  wine  continues  to  exist,  or  is  so  merged  in 
the  higher  essence  that  only  its  phenomenal  accidents 
remain.  In  both  cases  the  simple  perceptions  of  faith 
were  turned  upside  down  by  theory. 

The  dialectic  activities  of  the  Middle  Age  added  little 
to  the  Church  doctrine  of  our  Lord's  person.^  In  pro- 
portion as  the  historic  Life  grew  dim  and  the  exalted 
Saviour  receded  in  the  distance,  the  interval  was  filled 
with  other  mediators,  highest  of  all  being  the  Virgin  Mary. 
The    anhypostasia   was    steadily  maintained.      But    Scheel 

^  See  an  important  note  by  Loofs,  Leitfaden,  531-32. 


MEDI.EVAL    CHRISTOLOGY  227 

observes  with  great  point  that  "  outside  the  topic  of  the 
person  of  Christ,  where  the  impersonality  of  His  human 
nature  is  asserted,  Catholic  dogmatic  has  in  the  doctrine 
of  His  work  emphasised  the  humanity  so  strongly  that 
its  impersonality  seems  to  be  forgotten."  ^  Practical  piety 
kept  a  firm  grasp  on  the  full  manhood  of  Jesus,  as  is 
proved  by  the  immense  literature  on  the  Imitation  of 
Christ,  yet  without  affecting  Christology  proper.  Above 
all,  the  great  mediaeval  theories  of  Atonement,  to  be  intelli- 
gible, required  a  genuine  humanity,  animated  and  energised 
lay  the  personal  life  of  a  Brother.  Anselm's  words  as  to 
the  "  merit "  of  Christ  have  no  meaning,  if  Christ  the 
man  had  no  personality.  In  essence  this  is  true  also  of 
Abelard  and  St.  Bernard.  The  later  scholastics,  without 
exception,  build  the  argument  on  Augustine's  great  maxim : 
in  quantum  homo,  in  taiduni  mediator;  so  especially 
Peter  the  Lombard.  The  deity  of  Christ  came  into  view 
rather  as  the  infinite  co-efficient  raising  human  action 
and  passion  to  an  infinite  value.  Yet  these  teachers,  in 
the  Christological  section  of  their  work,  set  forth  a  view 
which  was  simply  docetic.  Indeed,  the  Lombard  did  not 
scruple  to  say  that  in  respect  of  His  humanity  Christ 
was  nothing  at  all  (Christus  secundum  hominem  non  est 
persona,  nee  aliquid),  but  at  this  Kihilianism  the  Church 
took  fright,  and  he  was  censured  in  1170.  Here  can 
be  traced  the  malign  influence  of  the  pseudo-Dionysius, 
that  unknown  Christian  theosophist  of  (probably)  the 
sixth  century,  whose  Neo-Platonic  and  more  than  half- 
docetic  conceptions  did  so  much  to  colour  mediaeval 
religious  thought,  and  to  infect  it  with  a  mysticism  which 
had  nothing  Christian  about  it  save  the  name. 

No  writer  of  this  time  approaches  Bernard  of  Clairvaux 
in  the  intensity  with  which  he  realised  the  manhood  of 
Jesus.  Besides  the  mysterious  and  half-unknown  Christ 
of  the  sacrament,  he  grasps  and  clings  to  the  Man  whose 
mind  and  deeds  and  passion  are  the  medium  of  Divine 
life  to  the  world.  In  the  historic  Christ  God  is  personally 
'  Op.  cit.  274. 


228  THE    PERSON    OF   JESUS    CHRIST 

present  to  redeem.  Cum  nomino  Jcsiim,  he  says  in  a 
beautiful  phrase,  homincm  mihi  proj^ono  mitem  et  humilem 
corde  .  .  .  eundemque  ipsum  dcum  omnipotentem}- 

Like  other  thinkers  of  the  period,  Thomas  Aquinas 
(d.  1274)  and  Duns  Scotus  (d.  1308)  also  did  homage 
to  an  idea  of  God  well-nigh  excessive  in  its  remote  tran- 
scendence. In  Christology  it  was  felt  that  at  all  hazards 
a  confusion  of  deity  with  finite  forms  of  life  must  be 
avoided.  Hence  Aquinas  teaches  that  the  Logos  takes 
impersonal — though  somehow  individual — human  nature 
into  unity  with  itself;  the  counterstroke  immediately 
following,  however,  to  the  effect  that  after  all  the 
union  is  real  not  in  the  Divine  nature,  but  in  the  human 
nature  only.  Or,  to  put  it  otherwise,  the  natures  are  not 
so  much  united,  as  brought  into  a  common  relation  to 
the  Logos.  At  bottom,  the  theory  is  Monophysite.  It 
means  that  the  incarnation  is  to  be  constructed  merely 
in  a  relative  sense ;  for,  while  God  is  present  in  the 
manhood  of  Jesus,  it  is  only  in  such  a  fashion  that  He 
might  equally  be  present  in  more  than  one  man,  and 
other  instances  of  God-manhood  are  quite  thinkable  as 
well  as  the  historic  Saviour.  Nowhere  else  is  the  error 
so  apparent  of  regarding  Christology  as  an  abstract 
problem  in  the  combination  of  Infinite  and  finite,  with 
the  inevitable  result  that  on  each  side  of  the  equation 
impersonal  categories  are  inserted,  and  the  discussion 
has  practically  no  relevance  to  the  Jesus  of  the 
Gospels.  How  true  this  is  we  see  from  Thomas'  declara- 
tion that  from  the  conception  of  the  Virgin  onwards 
the  person  of  the  God-man  is  absolutely  complete  and 
perfected ;  in  Christ,  accordingly,  there  exists  neither 
faith  nor  hope,  since  both  are  excluded  by  His  perfect 
vision  of  God.  The  forms  of  human  knowledge  and 
volition  remain,  but  all  is  really  determined  by  the  will 
of  the  Word.  Even  so  the  unity  for  the  sake  of  which 
the  humanity  has  been  curtailed  is  not  achieved.  For 
Thomas  concedes   in  the  last  resort  that  Christ's  human 

^  ill  Cant.  15.  6  ;  quoted  by  Loofs. 


THOMAS    AQUINAS    AND    DUNS    SCOTUS  229 

mind,  as  being  created,  is,  unlike  His  deity,  incapable  of 
grasping  the  Divine  essence.  His  soul  knows  all  that  is 
or  will  be ;  not,  however,  that  which  is  possible.  So,  too, 
with  the  omnipotence  which,  as  Son  of  God,  He  possessed 
wholly,  but  as  Son  of  Man  only  in  part,  and  as  far  as  the 
measures  of  humanity  permit.  But  Aquinas  has  much  to 
say  that  is  noble  regarding  the  man  Christ  Jesus  as  the 
recipient  of  grace. 

Perhaps  the  most  disconcerting  notion  in  this  theory 
as  a  whole  is  an  allusion  to  the  possible  plurality  of 
incarnations,  for  a  shadow  is  thus  cast  upon  the  essential 
uniqueness  of  Christ  as  Saviour.  It  is  an  idea  with  which 
the  believing  mind  can  make  no  terms.  The  period  was 
one  that  hardly  felt  a  distinctive  interest  in  Christology. 
Men  were  content  to  prove  the  logical  connections  of 
the  traditional  scheme.  They  had  learnt  nothing,  and  also 
forgotten  nothing. 

Duns  Scotus,  a  generation  later,  was  scarcely  more  suc- 
cessful in  lifting  the  debate  to  a  truly  moral  plane.  And 
yet,  though  Thomism  conquered,  he  does  exhibit  a  deeper 
appreciation  of  Jesus'  human  experience,  and  faintly  in- 
dicates the  limitations  of  His  knowledge  as  man.  Even 
so  much  as  this,  however,  was  gained  only  at  the  cost  of 
distinguishing  very  sharply  between  the  two  natures,  for 
Duns  wholly  agreed  wuth  Thomas  in  affirming  that  neither 
suffering  nor  merit  could  be  predicated  of  the  Divine 
essence.  The  union  of  the  natures  is  at  best  a  relation 
of  dependence  whereby  the  humanity  is  subsumed  under 
the  divinity ;  a  relation  comparable  to  that  between 
substance  and  accident,  and  imposing  on  the  Godhead  no 
limit  of  any  kind.  Jesus  has  no  human  personality  or 
independent  being.  His  humanity  exists  in  the  Logos 
only  as  my  foot  exists  in  me.  The  man  alone  hccame,  not 
the  Logos  in  any  sense,  for  deity  cannot  become  that 
which  is  not  eternal.  Still,  the  instinct  for  a  true  man- 
hood was  ineradicable,  since  only  through  the  merit  of 
Jesus  is  the  world  redeemed. 


CHAPTER  VII. 

THE  CHRISTOLOGY  OF  THE  REFORMATION 
CHURCHES. 

§  1.  Luther. — It  is  not  too  much  to  say  that  with  the 
Reformation,  and  especially  with  Luther,  there  came  into 
the  world  a  deeper  understanding  of  the  person  of 
Christ  than  had  prevailed  since  the  apostolic  age. 
"  The  attitude  towards  Jesus  which  Luther  consciously 
held,"  says  Herrmann,  "  marks  a  step  forward  in  the 
development  of  the  Christian  religion."  ^  This  was  due 
to  religious  interest  being  now  simply  concentrated  on 
Christ,  and  no  longer  dispersed  vainly  over  a  multitude 
of  mediators  and  spiritual  exercises.  What  emerges  in 
consequence  is  a  distinctive  type  of  Christian  piety.  The 
Gospel  is  in  the  historic  Saviour,  and  it  is  all  there. 
Theology  and  Christology  are  no  longer  independent 
aspects  of  doctrine ;  they  coincide.  The  Reformers,  writes 
Dr.  Lindsay,  "  knew  no  other  God  than  the  God  who 
had  manifested  Himself  in  the  historical  Christ,  and  made 
us  see  in  the  miracle  of  faith  that  He  is  our  salvation."  * 

Luther's  system  of  belief,  if  system  it  may  be 
called,  rests  on  and  revolves  round  the  person  of  Jesus 
Christ.      To   him   faith  in   God   and    faith   in   Christ   are 

Literature — Bruce,  Humiliation  of  Christ  ^,  1881  ;  Th.  Harnack, 
Luthers  Theologie,  1862-86  ;  Kostlin,  Luthers  Theologic^,  1901 ;  von  Kiigelgen, 
Luthers  Auffas.ning  der  Gottheit  Christi^,  1901  ;  Lindsay,  History  of  the 
Reformation,  1906  ;  Herrmann,  Communion  with  God,  1906 ;  Hastings, 
Diet,  of  Christ  and  the  Go'ipels,  1908  ;  Bensow,  Die  Lehre  von  der  Kenose, 
1903  ;  Haering,  Der  christliche  Glaube  {Dogmatik),  1906;  Schaff,  History  of 
the  Creeds  of  Christendom,  1877. 

'  Communion  ivith  God  (2nd  Eng.  edition),  148. 

"  Hastings,  DCG.  ii.  862. 

230 


MARTIN    LUTHER  231 

one  and  the  same  thing.  "  I  have  no  God,"  he  exclaims, 
"  whether  in  heaven  or  in  earth,  and  I  know  of  none, 
outside  the  flesh  that  lies  in  the  bosom  of  the  Virgin 
Mary.  For  elsewhere  God  is  utterly  incomprehensible, 
but  comprehensible  in  the  flesh  of  Christ  alone."  And 
again :  "  Wilt  thou  go  surely  and  meet  and  grasp  God 
rightly,  so  finding  grace  and  help  in  Him,  be  not  persuaded 
to  seek  Him  elsewhere  than  in  the  Lord  Christ.  Let  thine 
art  and  study  begin  with  Christ,  and  there  let  it  stay  and 
cliug."  Hence  the  problems  of  the  Trinity  and  the  two 
natures  ceased  to  be  mere  enigmas  of  speculative  dialectic, 
providing  the  thcologia  glories,  as  Luther  called  it,  with 
a  field  for  keen  intellectual  play ;  at  every  point  they 
remained  in  living  touch  with  religion.  Christ  is  for 
sinners  the  one  mark  on  which  saving  trust  must  fix ; 
elsewhere  God  is  known  only  as  an  angry  and  devour- 
ing fire,  whereas  in  Christ  He  is  a  very  ocean  of  love 
unspeakable. 

It  was  among  the  rare  excellences  of  Luther's 
Christology  that  he  fastened  an  indissoluble  bond,  as 
St.  Paul  had  done,  between  the  person  of  the  B-edeemev  /■ 
and  His  redeeming  work.  Any  view  of  Christ,  therefore, 
which  may  be  developed  in  abstraction  from  what  He 
actually  did  for  men,  in  His  life,  death,  and  resurrection, 
is  but  a  formal  and  delusive  play  of  words.  To  start 
not  from  metaphysical  presuppositions  as  to  what  God- 
head and  manhood  are,  and  the  possibility  of  uniting 
them,  but  from  Jesus'  cross  and  victory  and  the  working 
of  His  Spirit  in  the  heart — this  is  the  only  true  way. 
These  two,  the  person  and  the  office,  are  an  organic  unity,  ■^' 
neither  being  intelligible  apart  from  the  other.  Both 
are  asserted  when  faith  says  "  our  Lord."  As  the  work 
is  eternal,  so  must  the  person  be.  On  the  other  hand, 
none  but  such  a  person  could  have  accomplished  a  work 
so  great.  Therefore  even  in  contemplating  the  passion  we 
ought  "  mostly  to  consider  the  person,  and  study  well  quis, 
qualis,  et  quantv.s  Christ  is." 

From  all    this    Luther    derives    an  intuitive  certainty 


232  THE    PERSON    OF    JESUS    CHRIST 

that  to  understand  Christ  we  must  begin  with  the 
knowledge  of  His  human  life.  To  him  the  manhood 
\/  of  Christ  signified  more  than  to  any  post-apostolic 
"^  teacher.  The  foundations  of  faith  are  to  be  laid  in 
the  recorded  facts  of  our  Lord's  career  as  man,  and 
anything  else  would  be  to  start  building  from  the  roof. 
"  The  Scriptures,"  he  says,  "  begin  very  gently,  and 
lead  us  on  to  Christ  as  to  a  man,  and  then  to  one 
who  is  Lord  over  all  creatures,  and  after  that  to  one  who 
is  God.  So  do  I  enter  delightfully,  and  learn  to  know 
God.  But  the  philosophers  and  doctors  have  insisted 
on  beginning  from  above ;  and  so  they  have  become  fools. 
We  must  begin  from  below,  and  after  that  come  upwards."  ^ 
Otherwise  we  miss  Him  who  is  the  ladder  that  guides 
us  upward  to  the  Father,  the  lowly  glass  in  which  we 
see  God.  Luther  is  quite  conscious  of  a  difference  in 
accent  separating  him  here  from  the  scholastics  and  even 
from  many  of  the  Fathers ;  it  is  indeed  his  complaint 
against  the  Eoman  Church,  that  she  never  dreamt  we 
ought  to  learn  to  recognise  God  in  Christ.^  Too  often  the 
Fathers  fled  from  the  manhood  of  Christ  to  the  Godhead, 
— *  pleading  that  the  flesh  profiteth  nothing.  Whereas  the 
fact  is  that  except  as  man  Christ  could  never  have 
redeemed  us  by  His  cross  and  triumph.  Sinners  are 
guilty ;  hence  none  but  the  proper  and  true  God  could 
"  purge  sin,  destroy  death,  remove  the  curse,"  and  only 
in  flesh  could  even  God  Himself  do  it.  Thus  it  is 
impossible  to  draw  Christ  too  deeply  down  into  nature 
and  the  flesh.  We  cannot  make  Him  too  human.  The 
mere  juxtaposition  of  Godhead  and  manhood,  as  Luther 
never  tires  of  repeating,  is  of  no  avail ;  we  must  have 
the  Son  of  God  fused  and  inwoven  with  humanity,  and 
one  person  therewith.  If  Christ  were  not  God,  there 
were  no  God  at  all,  but  in  Him  God  has  entered  into  a 
bond  with  sinners  closer  even  than  a  brother. 

Very    plain    words,    accordingly,    are    used    regarding 
the   reality   of   Jesus'   earthly    life    as   one    of    limitation, 
^  Werke  (Eii.  ed.),  xii.  412.  ^  Herrmann,  op.  cU.  157. 


LUTHER    ON    CHRIST    AS    MAN  233 

growth,  and  trial.  The  apocryphal  stories  of  His  youth 
are  "  mere  folly."  "  He  ate,  drank,  slept,  and  waked ; 
was  weary,  sad,  joyous ;  wept,  laughed  ;  was  hungry, 
thirsty,  cold ;  sweated,  talked,  worked,  prayed."  In  the 
days  of  earth  He  was  no  almighty  man.  So  far  from 
remaining  in  a  different  order  of  being,  "  there  was  no 
difference  between  Him  and  other  men  save  that  He 
was  God  and  without  sin."  Luther  wavers  slightly  on 
the  question  as  to  the  necessity  of  a  virgin  birth  for 
sinlessuess,  but  regarding  the  fact  alike  of  sinlessness  and 
of  birth  from  a  Virgin  he  has  no  doubts  at  all.  Always 
the  motive  of  this  unprecedented  insistence  on  our  Lord's 
humanity  is  religious  and  practical.  We  are  undone  if 
we  cannot  say,  "  This  Man  is  God." 

But  if  Christ  was  true  man,  faith  is  equally 
assured  that  He  was  not  mere  man.  It  is  the  very 
corner-stone  of  Luther's  theology  that  none  other  than 
God  could  avail  to  atone  for  human  sin.  Athanasius 
himself  could  not  speak  more  plainly  than  he  as  to  the 
absolute  centrality  of  the  Godhead  of  Christ.  "  If  Deity 
be  w^anting  in  Christ,"  he  writes,  "  there  is  no  help  or 
deliverance  for  us  against  God's  anger  and  judgments " ; 
and  again,  "  if  it  could  not  be  held  that  God  died  for  us, 
but  only  a  man,  then  we  are  lost."  Without  this  God 
who  died  and  rose  again,  we  dare  not  draw  near  in  worship. 
The  mystics  come  far  short  in  representing  Him  as  only 
an  example,  for  that  turns  Him  in  reality  into  "  an  angry 
judge  and  a  horrible  tyrant."  But  the  principle  that 
the  person  is  as  the  w^ork  guides  us  aright,  for  "  since 
no  one  can  give  eternal  life  but  God  alone,  it  follows 
inevitably  that  Christ  must  be  truly  and  naturally  God." 
Strong  words  come  to  Luther's  pen  as  he  thinks  of  the 
Zwinglian  conception  of  Alloiosis,  according  to  which  it 
is  only  by  a  figure  of  speech  we  can  assert  an  interchange 
of  qualities  between  the  natures — manhood  and  Godhead 
thus  being  ultimately  kept  apart.  This,  says  Luther,  is 
sheerly  false,  "  for  if  I  believe  that  the  human  nature 
alone  suffered  for  me,  then  is  Christ  worse  than  no  Saviour 


234  THE    PERSON    OF   JESUS    CHRIST 

to  me."  The  objection  that  Godhead  cannot  suffer  he 
grants  as  an  abstract  proposition,  but  one  overruled  by 
the  actualities  of  the  Scripture  record.  To  repeat  it  yet 
once  more,  he  knows  no  God  except  the  child  on  Mary's 
bosom  and  the  Man  upon  the  cross.  In  Dr.  Lindsay's 
admirable  phrase,  "  Christ  fills  the  whole  sphere  of 
God."i 

These  two  sides,  the  deity  and  tlie  humanity,  were 
held  or  rather  fused  together  by  Luther  with  a  kind  of 
passion.  "  Since  Cyril,"  writes  Harnack,  "  no  teacher 
has  arisen  in  the  Church,  to  whom  the  mystery  of  the 
unity  of  the  two  natures  in  Christ  was  so  deep  a  consola- 
tion." ^  Christ  as  daysman,  as  Mediator,  must  by  the  very 
constituents  of  His  person  have  standing-ground  on  both 
sides,  so  binding  God  and  man  in  unity.  We  are 
saved  through  soul-union  with  Christ,  a  union  so  personal 
and  vital  that  our  sins  become  His  and  His  perfect 
righteousness  ours ;  and  this  mystic  uuity  is  itself  possible 
only  because  in  Christ  God  is  one  with  manhood.  The 
doctrine  grows  sharper  in  the  sacramental  controversy, 
but  Luther  had  grasped  its  import  long  before.  To  quote 
the  luminous  words  of  Principal  Dykes :  "  The  tradi- 
tional Christology  of  the  schools,  which  so  coldly  held 
asunder  the  finite  and  infinite  natures,  seeing  in  the 
incarnation  no  more  than  a  mere  clothing  of  unchangeable 
Deity  with  a  garment  of  mortal  flesh  to  be  its  medium 
of  self-manifestation,  could  no  longer  satisfy.  Eather 
Luther  saw  in  the  incarnation  (1)  the  attainment  by  God 
of  what  He  has  always  longed  for  in  His  love,  namely, 
humanity  as  His  own  form  of  existence,  and  (2)  the 
reception  by  Man  of  what  he  was  made  for,  namely, 
Divinity  as  the  very  contents  of  his  spiritual  life ;  a 
union,  in  brief,  real  and  vital,  by  which  two  disparate, 
yet  allied  or  kindred,  natures  coalesce  for  good  and  all 
into  one  single  indivisible  personality."  ^ 

The  basal  article  of  faith  once  settled,  Luther  was  pre- 

1  Hastings,  DCO.  ii.  862.  ^  Dogmcngeschichte  (Ite  Aufl.),  iii.  695. 

^  Expository  Times  for  Dec.  1905,  105. 


CHRIST    AND    GOD    ALL    ONE  235 

pared  to  give  and  take  witli  respect  to  inherited  technical 
phrases,  provided  only  facts  were  secure.  He  could  even 
say,  in  a  well-known  passage,  tliat  his  soul  hated  the  word 
"  homoousion,"  and  tliat  he  preferred  not  to  employ  it.^ 
Modern  critical  theologians,  however,  are  scarcely  accurate 
in  regarding  Luther  as  a  forerunner  of  their  own  view 
that  the  Gospel  is  quite  independent  of  Christology.  It 
is  indeed  the  fact  that  acceptance  of  the  deity  of  Christ 
had  ceased,  for  Luther,  to  be  a  doctrinal  preliminary  of 
saving  faith  ;  but  this  is  so  because  Christ,  so  far  from 
counting  for  less  in  personal  religion,  now  counts  for  in- 
finitely more,  and  stands  in  the  very  centre  of  the  religious 
experience  itself.  Belief  in  His  Godhead,  in  other  words, 
is  no  mere  theoretic  approach  or  avenue  to  faith ;  it  was 
a  living  constituent  in  faith,  to  be  afterwards  analysed 
out  and  made  explicit  by  the  theologian.  Here  in  Christ, 
Luther  cries,  I  have  the  Father's  heart  and  will,  coming 
forth  in  love  for  my  salvation  ;  and  the  heresy  of  heresies 
is  that  which  separates  the  mind  and  disposition  of  God 
from  that  of  Jesus.  We  must  not  make  "  a  Christ  apart 
by  Himself  and  a  God  apart  by  Himself,"  but  reckon  the 
two  all  one.  Now  it  was  this  great  evangelical  intuition 
that  God  and  Christ  confront  us  as  a  single  Divine  re- 
deeming cause  that  moved  Luther  to  argue  with  such 
intensity  that  the  two  natures  are  so  united  that  they 
cannot  really  be  looked  at  apart.  There  had  been  a  time, 
he  admits,  when  he  thought  he  did  well  to  distinguish 
them ;  and  if  the  efforts  failed  by  which  he  later  strove 
to  rectify  this  error,  we  can  see  that  it  was  because  the 
condition  of  human  thought  in  his  time  supplied  no  cate- 
gories but  such  as  were  intrinsically  unequal  to  the  task. 
For  Luther,  as  for  Augustine  and  Athanasius,  "  Jesus  is  a 
Man  in  whom  God  dwells,  and  who  is  God";^  but  this 
is  a  faith  which  it  is  impossible  to  express  worthily  by 
saying  that  in  Him  a  Divine  nature  and  a  human  nature 
are  conjoined,  or  that   a   Divine   substance   underlies  the 

*  Of.  Th.  Harnack,  Luthcrs  Thcoloyie,  ii.  186. 
'  Lindsay,  ul  supra,  860. 


^ 


236  THE    PERSON    OF   JESUS    CHRIST 

human  life  of  Jesus.  The  experience  of  the  man  who 
finds  in  Christ  the  saving  presence  of  very  God  is,  as 
Herrmann  protests,  "  not  so  much  expressed  as  concealed 
by  the  formula  that  combines  a  Divine  nature  with  the 
human  nature  of  Jesus."  ^  This,  after  all,  does  no  more 
than  reproduce  the  content  of  one  of  the  Eeformer's  most 
characteristic  passages :  "  Christ  is  not  called  Christ  be- 
cause He  has  two  natures.  What  is  that  to  me  ?  That 
He  is  by  nature  God  and  man  is  for  Himself.  But  what 
gives  me  comfort  and  blessing  is  that  He  so  applies  His 
office  and  pours  forth  His  love  and  becomes  my  Saviour 
and  Eedeemer."^ 

Thus  new  thoughts  of  Christ  are  struggling  in  Luther 
with  old  forms.  In  terms,  to  take  one  instance,  he  sub- 
scribed to  the  old  dogma  of  the  impersonality  of  Christ's 
human  nature,  but  in  point  of  fact  he  felt  no  genuine 
interest  in  the  idea,  and  it  had  only  the  faintest  influence 
on  his  argument.  What  he  gives  to  the  world,  as  Loofs 
has  excellently  remarked,  is  not  new  dogmatic  ideas  but 
new  religious  intuitions.  By  a  vitalising  innovation  he 
drew  the  mind  of  a  whole  age  back  to  the  historic  Christ, 
declaring  with  tremendous  power  that  faith  possesses  its 
proper  object  solely  in  the  person  of  the  crucified  and 
exalted  Lord.  So  passionately  did  he  preach  the  unity 
of  Christ  and  God,  that  a  parallel  has  naturally  been 
pointed  out  between  his  naive  modalism  and  that  which 
we  have  discovered  in  primitive  writers  like  Ignatius. 
And  Herrmann  has  done  a  service  by  bringing  out  the 
fact,  so  significant  when  closely  scrutinised,  that  for  Luther 
the  right  confession  of  Christ's  deity  is  possible  only  for 
a  redeemed  man.  As  he  puts  it,  quite  in  Luther's  spirit, 
"  when  Christ  redeems  us  from  ourselves,  then  we  see  God 
working  upon  us  in  Christ's  person."*  It  is  true,  of 
course,  that  Luther  often  fell  beneath  the  level  of  these 
glorious  thoughts.  The  exigencies  of  controversy  at  times 
seduced  him  into  old    mistaken  paths.     The  two  -  nature 

'  Oojiimumon,  etc.,  151.  *  See  Erlangen  edition,  xii.  244. 

'  ut  siqjra,  167. 


AFTER    THE    REFORMATION  237 

doctrine  hampered  the  free  expression  of  liis  mind  Yet 
iu  nothing  was  his  greatness  as  a  Reformer  more  clearly 
manifested  than  in  his  rediscovery  of  the  historic 
Saviour,  who  redeems  sinful  men  by  drawing  them  into 
union  with  His  own  wondrous  person  as  disclosed  in  the 
New  Testament.  This  apostolic  Gospel  was  not  new 
in  religion,  but  for  long  it  had  been  banished  from 
theology.  In  this  man  it  rose  from  the  dead  once  more, 
and  by  claiming  to  revolutionise  men's  conception  of  our 
Lord's  saving  work,  claimed  also  to  reconstruct  their  ideas 
of  His  person.  And  to  this  hour  the  Church  is  occupied 
with  the  problem  essentially  as  it  was  stated  by  Martin 
Luther. 

§  2.  Tlte  Lutheran  and  Beformcd  Christologies.- — The 
Reformers,  alike  in  Germany  and  Switzerland,  had  made 
it  plain  that  they  took  over  without  reserve  the  orthodox 
Christology  of  the  ancient  Church,  as  set  forth  in  the 
three  so-called  Ecumenical  Creeds.  Melanchthon  indeed 
declared,  in  a  famous  sentence,  Hoc  est  Christum  cofjnoscere, 
hcneficia  eius  cognoscere  non  .  .  .  eius  naturas,  modos  incar- 
nationis  intueri ;  ^  but  the  pregnant  suggestion  was  not  yet 
developed,  and  the  Protestant  scholasticism  which  rose  to 
its  height  in  the  seventeenth  century  was  led  into  other 
paths,  in  the  first  instance  by  the  pressure  of  sacramental 
controversy.  A  dreary  formalism  took  possession  of  the 
official  views  of  Christ.  Dialectical  refinements,  with 
minute  distinctions  intended  to  veil  minute  concessions, 
or  to  avoid  the  more  glaring  self-contradictions  of  too 
omniscient  and  undaunted  hypotheses,  revived  the  in- 
tellectual methods  of  the  Middle  Ages,  and  went  far  to 
stifle  the  fresh  and  life-giving  intuitions  of  the  Reforma- 
tion. The  main  interest  of  this  uninspiring  age,  so  far 
as  our  subject  is  concerned,  lies  in  the  revival  of  that 
old  dispute  as  to  the  relation  of  Godhead  and  manhood 
in  Christ,  which  had  prevailed  between  Alexandria 
and    Antioch.      Now    it    came    up    freshly,    in    a    modi- 

^  Loci  of  1521,  lutvodnction. 


238  THE    PERSON    OF   JESUS    CHRIST 

fied  form,  as  between  the  Lutheran  and  the  Eeformed 
Churches,  having  been  stimulated  into  detailed  expression 
rather  than  initiated  bj  a  divergence  of  view  regarding 
the  Lord's  Supper.  Consubstantiation  and  the  ubiquity 
of  the  Body  and  Blood  of  Christ  went  hand  in  hand,  and 
shaped  the  Lutheran  reading  of  the  two-nature  doctrine. 
At  one  in  the  conviction  that  the  eternal  and  pre- existent 
Son  had  become  man  by  assuming  human  nature  in  its 
entirety,  the  two  Churches  differed  in  their  interpretation 
of  the  composite  unity  thus  created. 

The  official  Lutheran  Christology  at  the  close  of  the 
sixteenth  century  is  to  be  found  in  the  Formula  of  Con- 
cord of  1577  (Art.  8),  behind  which  lie  domestic  contro- 
versies of  scarcely  more  than  pathological  interest.  It 
must  be  said  that  the  theory  of  Christ's  person  here  set 
forth  attaches  itself,  often,  to  Luther's  least  happy  sug- 
gestions, and  even  petrifies  as  dogmas  what  were,  for  his 
own  mind,  only  so  many  vivid  metaphors.  A  compro- 
mise had  to  be  found  between  the  views  of  Brenz  and 
Chemnitz.^  According  to  Brenz,  the  unity  of  the  Divine- 
human  person  is  such  that  from  the  moment  of  the 
incarnation  Christ's  manhood  shares  in  the  glory  and 
power  of  His  deity.  He  did  not  renounce  the  use  of 
this  power  and  glory  even  in  the  days  of  His  flesh,  though 
for  the  most  part  He  exercised  it  only  in  a  hidden  manner, 
and  Brenz  feels  himself  justified  in  saying  that  the  living 
Christ  in  His  majesty  governed  heaven  and  earth  while 
He  yet  lay  dead  in  the  sepulchre.  On  these  terms  our 
Lord's  humanity  is  ubiquitous  in  the  fullest  sense. 
Chemnitz,  on  the  other  hand,  pleads  for  what  is  designated 
the  muUivoliprcesentia,  i.e.  the  power  of  being  present  at 
will  simultaneously  in  many  places.  This  power,  he  holds, 
resides  in  Christ's  manhood  in  virtue  of  its  having  been 
absolutely  suffused  by  the  Divine  nature,  which  ever 
after  works  in,  with,  and  through  the  other.  At  the 
same    time,  though    on    earth    Christ    in    His    humanity 

^  Brenz  was  at  the  head  of  the  Swabian  school,  while  Chemnitz  led  the 
Lower  Saxons, 


BRENZ    AND    CHEMNITZ  239 

possessed  all  the  fulness  of  the  Godhead,  He  chose  not 
to  use  or  manifest  it,  but  suspended  its  exercise  tem- 
porarily. The  Formula  of  Concord,  on  the  whole,  leans 
to  the  side  of  Chemnitz.  There  is  a  real  communication 
of  qualities  from  one  nature  to  the  other,  the  deity  par- 
ticipating in  the  passion  of  the  humanity,  the  humanity 
in  the  majesty  of  the  Divine.  Yet  it  is  insisted  that  no 
transformation  of  the  qualities  of  one  nature  into  those 
of  the  other  is  to  be  supposed ;  what  took  place  was  not 
an  essential  transfusion,  but  a  permanent  communication ; 
and  withal  there  is  an  explicit  statement  to  the  effect  that 
no  addition  to  or  diminution  of  the  attributes  of  the 
Divine  nature  resulted  from  the  incarnation  of  the  Word.^ 
Turning  to  the  contrasted  Christologies  held  by 
the  Lutheran  and  the  Eeformed  Churches,  let  us  note 
that  the  Lutherans,  in  the  endeavour  to  give  fuller 
expression  to  the  religious  content  of  faith,  were  mainly 
eager  to  bring  out  the  unity  of  the  Divine-human 
life.  Hence  they  went  back  to  Luther's  underlying 
axiom,  "  that  human  nature  has  been  created  for  par- 
ticipation in  the  life  of  God,  and  is  destined  to  reach  it 
to  a  degree  of  which  we  can  form  no  conception  save 
from  the  exemplary  instance  of  Jesus  Christ,  our  Head."  ^ 
Finitum  est  capax  infiniti.  Insisting  that  the  inseparability 
of  the  two  natures  must  be  taken  seriously,  they  worked 

^  That  the  matter  was  after  all  left  ambiguous  is  proved  by  the  seventeenth, 
ceutur}'  controversy  between  the  Tubingen  theologians  and  those  of  Giessen 
(1616-27).  They  long  debated  the  question:  Did  the  God  -  man,  in 
the  days  of  His  flesh,  actually  renounce  the  use  of  Divine  powers, 
in  respect  of  His  humanity  (both  sides  agreed  that  these  powers  were 
in  His  possession),  or  did  He  merely  employ  them  secretly  ?  The  first 
view  is  that  of  Giessen.  Tiibingen  took  the  second,  holding  that  in 
secret  the  child  Jesus  ruled  the  universe  qua  man,  and  that  He  later  ex- 
hibited at  times  both  omnipotence  and  omniscience.  Gradually  the  opinion 
of  Giessen  prevailed,  though  illogically  enough  on  the  strictly  Lutheran 
premises  ;  and  in  Quenstedt,  at  whose  hands  the  doctrine  received  final 
shape,  the  presence  in  the  manhood  of  Christ  of  strictly  Divine  powers  had 
become  a  mere  potentiality.  Cf.  Haering,  Der  christlicTie  Glauhe,  434  ; 
Schmid,  Doctrinal  Theology  of  the  Lutheran  Church  (Eng.  tr.  by  Hay  and 
Jacobs),  396  ff.  ;  and  see  Index  of  Bruce,  HumUioiion  of  Christ, 

^  Dykes,  ut  su^ra,  104. 


240  THE    PERSON    OF    JESUS    CHRIST 

out  a  theory  in  rather  unprofitable  detail.  First  of  all 
comes  the  unitio,  or  incarnation,  the  actual  combination, 
that  is  to  say,  of  deity  and  humanity  in  one  person ; 
and  this  is  strictly  an  act.  The  permanent  result,  on 
the  other  hand,  is  a  state,  the  perpetual  conjunction  with 
mutual  possession  of  the  two  natures  now  subsisting  in 
the  one  person  of  the  Son ;  this  state  being  technically 
known  as  the  unio  personalis.  It  is  not  that  a  part  of 
the  Logos  is  united  to  a  part  of  the  flesh.  Eather  the 
whole  Logos  and  the  whole  flesh  form  one  indissoluble 
Life,  the  hypostasis  of  the  manhood,  which  in  itself  is 
impersonal,  being  constituted  or  replaced  by  the  pre- 
existent  Divine  personality.  So  closely  joined  and,  as  it 
were,  coextensive,  are  the  natures,  that  the  Logos  has  no 
existence  outside  the  flesh,  nor  the  flesh  outside  the 
Logos  {Logos  tot  us  in  came).  In  short,  it  is  no  mere  verbal 
or  ideal  or  relative  union,  but  one  which  is  wholly  reciprocal 
and  personal.  Finally,  from  the  personal  union,  and  the 
resulting  communion  or  mutual  permeation  of  natures, 
there  flows  the  communicatio  idiomatum,  a  peculiar  and 
original  tenet  for  which  appeal  was  made  to  Col  2^. 
In  two  ways,  it  is  true,  the  ancient  Church  had  taught 
a  mutual  transference  of  qualities  in  the  Saviour's  person. 
First,  qualities  of  either  nature  may  be  ascribed  to  the 
Divine-human  person,  as  when  it  is  said,  "  Christ  is  of  the 
seed  of  David,"  or  "  The  Son  of  Man  is  from  heaven " 
{genus  idiomaticum) ;  secondly,  redemptive  qualities  or 
actions  of  the  theanthropic  person  as  a  whole  may  be 
ascribed  to  one  or  other  of  the  natures,  as  in  the  pro- 
positions, "  The  Son  of  God  was  manifested  to  destroy  the 
works  of  the  devil,"  or,  "  The  blood  of  Jesus  cleanses 
from  sin  "  {genus  apotelesmaticum).  But  the  Lutherans  went 
further,  and  became  responsible  for  what  was  really  a 
theological  innovation,  by  definitely  teaching  that  Divine 
attributes  may  be  predicated  of  the  human  nature, 
since  there  is  a  real  transference  of  properties  from  the 
one  side  to  the  other  ;  they  exchange  something  of  their  sub- 
stance as  if  by  a  process  of  endosmosis  {genus  majestaticum). 


THE    LUTHERAN    CONSTRUCTION  241 

Even  in  His  human  nature  Christ  is  ahnighty  and  omni- 
present, and  a  basis  is  thus  found  in  strictly  Christological 
doctrine  for  the  tenet  of  the  sacramental  ubiquity,  or 
multipresence,  of  the  Saviour's  body.  The  fourth  possible 
class  of  propositions,  asserting  the  conveyance  of  human 
properties  to  deity,  was  summarily  put  aside,  no  one 
being  found  to  question  the  immutability  of  Godhead.^ 

A  little  reflection  is  enough,  I  think,  to  prove  that 
this  dogmatic  Lutheran  Christology  has  swung  round 
eventually  in  a  direction  exactly  opposite  to  that  in  which 
primarily  it  had  sought  to  move.  For  the  inspiring 
motive  of  the  whole  had  been  a  passionate  desire  to 
vindicate  for  faith  the  possession  of  a  Divine  Christ,  whom 
we  can  grasp  and  hold.  It  was  for  the  sake  of  this  that 
Luther  put  forward  the  stupendous  conception  of  a  humanity 
which  is  omniscient  and  almighty.  Now  in  all  probability 
Luther's  mind,  in  affirming  that  the  manhood  received 
and  used  the  properties  of  Godhead,  was  chiefly  occupied 
with  the  exalted  Lord  in  His  risen  majesty ;  yet 
further  reflection  was  sure  to  suggest  that  if  this  inter- 
communication of  qualities  was  a  fact,  and  an  essential 
outcome  of  the  personal  union  of  the  natures,  it  was 
impossible  that  it  should  date  merely  from  the  ascension. 
Eather  it  must  belong  to  the  earthly  Jesus  from  the  first 
moment  of  incarnation.  And  at  once  this  evoked  two 
objections.  First,  it  might  be  said,  the  Gospels  present 
us  with  no  such  Figure — a  man  who  yet  is  omniscient 
or  omnipresent  ■  on  the  contrary,  He  exhibits  the  natural 
and  accustomed  limitations  of  humanity.  To  meet  this 
difficulty,  the  older  Lutheran  divines  took  a  somewhat 
novel  line  as  to  the  "  states  "  of  Christ  and  the  Kenosis 
which  Scripture  declares  Him  to  have  undergone.  They 
drew  a  sharp  distinction  between  incarnation  and  humilia- 
tion. The  subject  of  humiliation  or  self-emptying  is  not 
the  Logos,  for  in  becoming   man  the    Logos    surrendered 

'  It  is  at  this  point  that  modern  Kcnotic  theories  have  interposcfl, 
asking  whether  that  which  is  commonly  said  to  be  inconceivable  is  so 
in  fact. 

i6 


242  THE    PERSON   OF   JESUS    CHRIST 

nothing  of  His  Divine  majesty.  The  subject  of  humiliation 
is  the  God-man  in  respect  of  His  human  nature ;  and  for 
Him  humihation  consisted  solely  in  this,  that  while  retain- 
ing possession  of  the  Divine  qualities  conveyed  to  His 
humanity  by  its  union  with  the  Logos,  He  yet  made 
no  habitual  use  of  them.  He  usually  dispensed  with  them, 
and  only  at  times  did  His  real  powers  flash  through  the 
veil. 

But  this  naturally  provokes  a  second  criticism. 
Apart  from  the  fact  that  the  scheme  still  impairs  the 
full  manhood  of  the  historic  Christ,  is  there  not,  one  feels, 
something  curiously  mechanical  in  a  conception  of  deity 
and  humanity,  and  their  mutual  relations,  which  first 
combines  them  absolutely  in  order  to  secure  a  personal 
unity  of  life,  and  then  cancels  the  reality  of  the  combina- 
tion lest  its  effect  should  be  to  submerge  the  lesser  of 
the  two  united  factors  ?  Thus  Lutheran  dogma  spoke  of 
the  infant  Jesus  ruling  the  universe,  but  only  secretly ; 
and  both  the  leading  statement,  and  still  more  if  possible 
the  added  qualification,  leave  an  impression  of  being 
completely  alien  to  the  thought  of  the  New  Testament. 
Further,  it  is  doubtful  whether  the  goal  aimed  at,  even  as 
regards  the  Atonement,  could  really  be  attained  this  way. 
It  was  axiomatic  indeed  that  the  blood  of  Christ  has 
infinite  expiatory  value,  as  being  the  life-blood  of  the  God- 
man  ;  but  if  Christ  in  order  to  be  capable  of  death  must 
disengage  His  humanity  yet  once  more  from  the  Divine 
properties  conferred  on  it  by  incarnation,  loosening  anew 
the  formed  union,  could  it  be  said  that  His  blood  any 
longer  possessed  that  infinite  worth  which  derives  from 
personal  oneness  with  the  Divine  ?  For  now  it  is  not 
the  God-man  who  dies,  but  a  humanity  disengaged  from 
ihe  higher  unity.^ 

If  the  Lutherans  prolonged  the  line  of  Alexandrian 
reflection,  the  Reformed  Christology,  on  the  other  hand, 
maintained  the  traditions  of  Antioch,  holding  the  formulas 
of    Chalcedon  as  sacrosanct.     The  Lutheran  maxim  they 

^  Of.  Haering,  ut  supra,  434. 


THE    REFORMED   THEORY  243 

met  with  a  direct  negative :  fiiiitum  non  est  cai^ax  infiniti. 
In  consequence  they  held  the  Divine  and  human  natures 
rigidly,  not  to  say  coldly,  in  separation.  It  is  true  that 
in  Christ  the  Infinite  nature  and  the  finite  co-exist  in  a 
personal  union  mediated  by  the  Holy  Spirit,  for  the 
person  of  the  former,  i.e.  the  eternal  Logos,  has  assumed 
the  latter,  and  henceforward  is  the  God-man  Jesus  Christ. 
But  the  special  teaching  of  the  Lutherans  as  to  the 
communication  of  qualities  they  rejected,  as  leading  to 
the  deification  of  the  Lord's  manhood.  Each  nature  retains 
the  attributes  properly  belonging  to  it ;  the  hypostatic 
unity,  therefore,  is  of  an  indirect  kind,  being  placed  wholly 
in  the  person,  which  singly  rules  over  and  combines  two 
entities  in  themselves  separate.  Of  tliis  oneness  the  best 
illustration  or  analogy  is  given  in  the  mystic  union  of 
Christ  with  the  believing  soul.  In  harmony  with  this,  the 
Eeformed  divines  put  forward  a  different  interpretation 
of  the  Kenosis.  The  subject  of  humiliation  in  Ph  2, 
they  rightly  held,  is  not  the  incarnate  God-man,  but  the 
pre-incarnate  Son  ;  and  for  the  apostle's  mind  humiliation 
is  simply  the  incarnation.  Closer  inspection,  no  doubt, 
reveals  the  fact  that  after  all  the  Logos  is  considered 
not  to  have  divested  Himself  of  His  Divine  glory,  but 
only  to  have  conjoined  the  human  nature  in  personal 
union  with  Himself.  Nevertheless,  the  Eeformed  writers 
insisted  with  tenacity  that  this  manhood  was  veritably 
human,  of  one  essence  with  our  own ;  and  in  great 
measure  the  strength  and  religious  value  of  their  con- 
struction lay  in  this  persistent  effort  to  do  justice  to 
Jesus'  experience  of  growth  and  trial,  as  recorded  with 
concrete  detail  in  the  Gospels.  Sinless  and  infallible. 
He  yet  grew  in  knowledge,  holiness,  and  power.  Not 
even  in  the  exalted  state  does  His  human  nature  cease 
to  be  separated  from  the  Divine  by  an  impassable  gulf. 
Perhaps  it  was  by  a  certain  instinct  of  compensation 
that  this  insistence  upon  the  sublime  and  absolute  tran- 
scendence of  the  Divine  Logos,  even  in  relation  to  His 
own   manhood,  came   to  have   alongside  of  it  so  marked 


244  THE    PERSON    OF    JESUS    CHRIST 

an  emphasis  on  the  ethical  reality  of  Jesus'  human  life. 
Be  that  as  it  may,  while  the  Lutherans  had  taught  that 
the  whole  Logos  was  present  in  Jesus,  the  sharp  distinction 
of  Infinite  and  finite  in  the  Eeformed  scheme  made  this 
impossible.  It  was  decided,  therefore,  that  the  Logos, 
truly  present  in  Jesus'  manhood,  is  none  the  less  existent 
outside  it — totus  extra  carncm  as  well  as  totus  in  came — 
governing  the  world  simultaneously  from  a  different  centre 
of  life  and  coosciousness,  so  to  speak,  from  that  at  which 
He  dwelt  incarnate  in  Jesus.^  It  is  not  surprising  that 
opponents  should  at  once  have  rejoined  that  on  these 
terms  the  incarnation  was  made  of  none  effect,  since  the 
relation  of  the  Logos  to  Jesus  now  resembled  that  which 
He  bears  to  other  men  alike  in  degree  and  in  kind. 

If  the  Lutherans  had  made  the  reality  of  Christ's 
human  nature  dubious,  equally  natural  was  the  charge 
that  Eeformed  writers  destroyed  the  unity  of  the  person. 
It  was  argued  that  for  them  the  two  natures  present  in 
the  theanthropic  life  are  glued  together  "  like  two  boards," 
with  no  living  interpenetration.  They  had  accused  the 
Lutherans  of  being  Monophysites  or  Docetics,  and  now 
they  had  to  hear  themselves  styled  Nestorians  and 
Ebionites.  The  relative  justice  of  these  unhappy  recrimi- 
nations we  cannot  stay  to  canvass,  but  at  least  we  ought 
not  to  miss  the  great  religious  motives  operating  in  the 
expressed  convictions  of  both  sides.  If  the  Lutherans 
had  made  a  nobly  conceived  effort  to  formulate  the 
truth  that  Jesus  is  Immanuel,  God  with  us,  the  concrete 
presence   of    God    in    perfect   manhood,  the    Calvinists   in 

'This  is  what  is  meant  by  illud  "extra"  Calvinisticum,  of  which 
Lutheran  divines  speak  with  an  approach  to  horror.  Calvin  formulates  it 
with  his  usual  clearness:  "Although  the  boundless  essence  of  the  Word 
was  united  with  human  nature  into  one  person,  we  have  no  idea  of  any 
enclosing.  The  Son  of  God  descended  miraculously  from  heaven,  yet 
without  abandoning  heaven  ;  was  pleased  to  be  conceived  miraculously  in 
the  Virgin's  womb,  to  live  on  the  earth,  and  hang  upon  the  cross,  and  yet 
always  filled  the  world  as  from  the  beginning"  {I71sf.it utes,  bk.  ii.  chap.  13, 
ad  Jin.).  This  view  can  unquestionably  appeal  to  the  general  trend  of 
ancient  and  mediaival  Christolofiy,  but  it  may  well  be  doubted  whether  it 
does  justice  to  the  religious  interests  bound  up  with  the  idea  of  incarnation. 


SOCINIANISM  245 

turu  procluiiiied  no  less  truly  the  reality  of  Jesus'  liunian 
life,  as  a  religious  and  ethical  experience,  striving  to 
regard  the  Incarnate  One  "  as  He  regarded  Himself — 
as  the  Son  of  Man,  the  Man  of  sorrows  and  acquainted 
with  grief."  ^ 

These  two  Christologies  offered  an  easy  mark  to  the 
polemic  of  the  Socinians.  The  leader  of  these  theo- 
logical insurgents,  Faustus  Socinus  (1539-1G04),  had 
proclaimed  that  if  religious  doctrines  are  to  be  believed, 
they  must  be  amenable  to  the  strict  rules  of  logic ;  and 
accordingly  he  had  denied  the  doctrine  of  the  Trinity, 
of  the  pre-existence  of  Christ,  and  of  His  two  natures. 
Jesus  is  a  mere  man,  but  He  was  sent  into  the  world  by 
a  benignant  God,  and  only  through  Him  can  salvation  be 
secured.  Yet  to  this  mere  man  wonderful  things  have 
happened,  and  it  is  hardly  an  exaggeration  to  say  that 
Socinus  could  have  accepted  every  article  in  the  Apostles' 
Creed.  For  Jesus  is  distinguished  from  all  other  men 
by  His  birth  of  a  virgin,  by  His  sinlessness,  and  by  a 
special  baptism  of  the  Holy  Spirit,  endowing  Him  with 
miraculous  power ;  not  only  so,  but  as  a  reward  for  the 
perfect  obedience  of  His  eartlily  life  He  has  been  raised 
to  heaven  and  constituted  God's  viceroy  over  the  whole 
universe.^  In  this  capacity,  we  are  expressly  told.  He  ought 
to  be  worshipped,  for,  though  not  in  Himself  possessed  of 
the  Divine  right  to  worship,  special  permission  has  been 
accorded  to  believers  by  God  sanctioning  His  adoration ; 
and  Socinus  went  so  far  as  to  hold  that  the  exalted  Jesus 
might  properly  be  called  God.  Nevertheless  to  these 
far-reaching  Christian  affirmations  there  were  appended 
the  most  singular  negations.      God,  in   the  last  resort,  is 

^  Bruce,  id  supra,  132.  On  the  whole  subject  of  the  Lutheran  and 
Reformed  Christologies,  see  his  fine  chajjter. 

-"Even  the  critical  spirits  of  the  Reformation  period,  the  Socinian 
Unitarians,  made  no  real  headway  till  they  had  elevated  the  creaturely  Jesus, 
by  resurrection,  to  a  heavenly  world-papacy"  (Ktihler,  Angewandte  Dogmen, 
132).  They  are  the  clearest  instance  in  history  of  the  theory  which 
ascribes  to  Christ  a  gewordene  GoUheit,  a  Godhead  which  once  was  not 
but  now  is. 


246  THE    PERSON    OF   JESUS    CHRIST 

not  present  personally  in  Jesus,  and  His  position  as 
glorified  and  in  a  sense  Divine  Lord  can  be  justified  only 
by  a  species  of  what  we  must  call  deification.  One  feels 
that  neither  orthodox  nor  heretics  were  so  placed  as  to 
comprehend  each  other,  and  that  already  the  conditions 
of  the  problem  were  passing  into  a  new  phase,  of  which 
it  may  be  the  final  issues  have  not  yet  emerged.  "  This 
Socinian  doctrine,"  Professor  Dick  Fleming  has  said,  "  rests 
on  the  same  presuppositions  as  the  orthodoxy  of  the  day, 
namely,  that  the  supreme  and  essential  characters  of  deity 
are  omnipotence,  omniscience,  unchangeableness ;  but  by 
applying  this  conception  logically  to  the  person  of  Christ, 
Socinians  emptied  their  Christology  of  all  religious  value. 
For  union  with  God  is  the  need  of  the  human  heart ;  and 
the  doctrine  of  the  God-man,  contradictory  as  it  was,  held 
a  truth  for  which  Socinianism  found  no  expression."  ^ 

"We  turn  now  to  the  modern  phase  of  the  Christological 
question,  as  reconstituted  by  two  centuries  of  untiring 
historical  research.  New  questions  begin  to  be  asked, 
and  new  combinations  set  on  foot. 

*  Hastings,  DCQ,  ii.  867  ;  c£  Bovoii,  Dogmatique  Chritienne,  ii.  151. 


CHAPTER   VIII. 

CHRISTOLOGY  IN  THE  NINETEENTH  CENTURY. 

§  1.  Theocenfric  and  Anthropocentric  Conceptions.  —  Two 
hundred  years  ago  a  striking  change  of  attitude  took 
place  in  serious  students  of  the  person  of  Jesus  Christ. 
Till  then  the  point  of  departure  had  prevailingly 
been  thcoccntric,  as  it  may  be  called :  that  is,  men 
eno-ased  in  Christoloo-ical  construction  set  out  from  the 
Eternal  Word  or  Son,  the  Second  Person  of  the  Trinity, 
and  at  times  it  almost  seems  as  if  we  were  being 
summoned  to  watch  the  incarnation  taking  place  through 
the  eyes  of  God  Himself.  Somewhere  near  the  begin- 
ning of  the  eighteenth  century,  pioneer  minds  began  to 
feel  that  this  cannot  be  the  right  path  for  human  intelli- 
gence. We  must  start  from  a  point  closer  to  ourselves. 
So  the  great  modern  movement  of  research,  of  which  the 
outcome  has  virtually  been  a  rediscovery  of  the  historic 
Jesus,  who  is  now  better  known  than  at  any  period  since 
the  apostolic  age,  represents  an  ever-growing  volume  of 
devout  study  of  the  Life  pictured  in  the  Gospels,  inspired 

LiTERATUKE — Faut,  Die  Christologie  seit  Schleiermacher,  1907  ;  Giinther, 
Die  Lehre  von  der  Person  Chrisli  im  XlXten  Jahrhundcrt,  1911  ;  Weind, 
Jesus  im  XlXten  Jahrhunclert,  1903  ;  Bleek,  Die  Grundlagen  der  Christ- 
ologie Schleiermachers,  1898  ;  F.  H.  R.  Frank,  Geschichte  und  Krilik  der 
neuerea  Theologic*,  1908;  Frommel,  Chides  de  Theologie  Modcrne,  1909; 
Pfleiderer,  Development  of  Theology  in  Germany  and  in  Great  Britain  in  the 
Nineteenth  Century,  1890;  G.  Frank,  Geschichte  der  protestantischen  Theologie, 
Bd.  iv.,  1905;  HeiTmann,  "  Christliche  -  protestantische  Dogmatik,"  in 
Hinneberg's  Kaltur  der  Gegenwart,  I.  iv.  2,  1909  ;  Fairbairn,  Christ  in 
3fodern  Theology,  1893;  Bruce,  Humiliation  of  Christ-,  1881  ;  Bensow, 
Die  Lehrc  von  der  Kenose,  1903;  Orr,  Christian  View  of  God  and  the  IVorld, 
1893  ;  Tiilloch,  Movements  of  Religious  Thought,  1885  ;  Ecke,  Die  theolo- 
gische  Schule  A.  Ritsdds,  1897 ;  Garvie,  The  Ritschlian  Tlieology,  1899. 

847 


248  THE    PERSON    OF   JESUS    CHRIST 

by  the  convictiou  that,  whatever  more,  it  is  at  all  events 
genuinely  and  completely  human.  The  point  of  view, 
in  other  words,  gradually  became  anthropoccntric.  These 
adjectives  need  imply  no  serious  difference  of  opinion  as 
to  ultimate  conclusions ;  "  anthropoccntric "  must  not  be 
confused  with  "  humanitarian."  It  is  less  a  question  of 
antagonism  than  of  order.  For  both  sides  Christ  is  God 
manifest  in  the  flesh ;  indeed,  as  a  recent  writer  has 
remarked,  modern  preoccupation  with  the  historic  Christ 
"  has  had  the  effect  of  making  the  old  problem  of  His 
Person  stand  out  with  a  quite  fresh  sharpness  of  outline." 
For  it  is  precisely  the  unique  human  characteristics,  the 
transcendent  traits  and  personal  pretensions  plainly  ex- 
hibited in  the  record  that  send  us  back,  for  reasonable 
explanation,  far  and  beyond  the  possibilities  of  normal  man- 
hood. If  previously  the  movement  of  Christian  thought 
had  been  from  above  downwards,  its  direction  was  now 
imperceptibly  reversed,  and,  as  was  natural  in  an  inductive 
age,  came  to  be  upwards  from  below.  And  the  problem 
confronting  the  modern  mind  may,  therefore,  be  said  to 
be:  Given  the  fact  that  Jesus  is  thus  true  man,  proposing 
indeed  unheard-of  claims,  equally  separate  from  sinners 
and  distinct  from  saints,  yet  nowhere  transgressing  the 
limits  of  perfect  manhood  as  it  moves  within  unique  and 
inimitable  conditions,  what  is  the  relation  between  this 
Life,  in  which  God  is  personally  present,  and  the  inner 
being  of  the  Godhead  ?  And  further,  what  is  the  relation, 
in  the  person  of  Christ  Himself,  between  the  Divine 
content  of  His  being,  and  the  specific  form  it  assumed  in 
Him  of  a  perfectly  revealing  human  consciousness  ?  ^ 

Eound  this  question,  then,  the  Christological  work  of 
the  moderns  has  in  the  main  revolved,  although  its  orbit 
has  occasionally  swung  out  very  far  from  the  centre. 
During  the  nineteenth  century  a  varied  but  rewarding 
debate  went  on.  Not  since  the  age  of  the  Cappadocians 
has  the  person  of  our  Lord  so  held  the  focus  of  Christian 
thought  as  in  the  nineteenth  century. 

^  Cf.  Haering,  Doymatik,  423. 


EIGHTEENTH    CENTURY    RATIONALISM  249 

The  background  of  the  inuderu  movement  is  furnished 
by  the  uninspired  EatiouaHsm  of  the  Aufklarung.  Eohr, 
a  characteristic  exponent  of  its  temper,  declares  that 
Christology  has  no  place  in  the  system  of  Christian 
doctrine,  since  we  are  concerned  not  with  a  religion  for 
which  Jesus  is  object  of  faith,  but  only  with  that  which 
Jesus  taught.  Hence  the  Aufldarung  dispensed  with 
Christology  because  first  it  had  virtually  dispensed  with 
faith  in  Christ  as  Saviour.  Jesus  is  indeed  the  Teacher 
of  a  perfect  morality,  and  the  pattern  of  character  for  all 
time  ;  but  there  is  nothing  supernatural  about  Him.  To 
call  Him  in  any  metaphysical  sense  God's  Son  is  irrational, 
for  His  personality  was  the  product  of  natural  gifts  directed 
by  an  energetic  will.  Even  Kant  failed  to  transcend  these 
meagre  conclusions.  To  him  Christ  was  but  the  abstract 
idea  of  ethical  perfection,  of  moral  unity  with  God ;  and 
what  saves  is  faith  in  this  ideal,  not  in  Jesus  as  a  person. 
Church  doctrine,  he  said,  has  committed  the  error 
of  applying  to  Jesus  epithets  and  conceptions  which 
rightly  belong  to  the  ethical  ideal,  of  which  He  is  but 
the  symbol.  Thus,  for  example,  it  is  true  that  the  idea 
of  perfect  humanity  has  hovered  before  the  mind  of  God 
from  the  beginning,  and,  as  an  effluence  from  His  being, 
may  even  be  designated  His  Son  ;  but  to  speak  of  the 
pre-existeuce  of  Christ  is  mythology.  The  connection  of 
faith  w'ith  historical  events  is  purely  fortuitous,  and  the 
phrase  "  historical  revelation "  can  only  be  interpreted  as 
meaning  that  throughout  the  course  of  ages  the  eternal 
truths  of  Eeason  have  been  rising  into  the  clear  lisht 
of  knowledge.  This  is  tantamount  to  the  assertion  that 
Christ  has  no  permanent  place  in  the  religion  know-n 
by  His  name.  The  principle  of  Christianity  and  the 
person  of  Christ  were  distinguished  sharply — a  familiar 
phenomenon  in  the  ensuing  century,  and  even  now  not 
quite  obsolete,  though  it  is  easy  to  see  that  it  implies 
the  disappearance  of  the  Gospel  of  the  New  Testament. 
It  implies  that  Jesus  is  not,  in  any  legitimate  sense,  the 
object  of  saving  trust.      His  significance  for  religion  is  only 


250  THE    PERSON    OF    JESUS    CHRIST 

casual,  chronological,  indirect.  Our  business  is  solely 
with  the  rational  faith  of  which  Jesus  was  the  most 
eminent  preacher  and  pioneer ;  and  all  truth  about  God, 
virtue,  and  immortality  proclaimed  by  Him  may  be  ap- 
propriated, and  will  save  us,  quite  apart  from  a  personal 
relation  of  dependence  on  Christ  Himself.  "VVe  have  the 
seed,  and  can  ourselves  grow  the  flowers.  We  shall  see 
that  in  the  speculative  movement  which  sprang  from 
Kant  the  same  principle  is  regarded  as  axiomatic;  as 
when  Fichte,  for  example,  contends  that  unity  with  God  is 
the  great  matter,  but  the  path  to  it  wholly  immaterial. 
If  Christ  were  to  return  to  earth  He  would  set  little 
store  by  our  recognition  of  His  place  as  Eedeemer,  pro- 
vided only  Christianity  itself  were  dominating  the  minds 
of  men. 

Much  of  the  interest  of  this  period  lies  in  its  close 
affinity  with  a  widely  spread  tendency  of  the  present 
day.  Eecently  a  prominent  writer  of  the  advanced  wing 
declared,  with  grave  emphasis,  that  if  historical  in- 
vestigation were  to  decide  that  Jesus  had  never  lived, 
he  should  not  as  a  religious  man  feel  himself  seriously 
impoverished  or  disconcerted.  We  have  the  ideas  of  the 
Gospel,  and  may  neglect  its  facts.  But  if  our  personal 
relation  to  Christ,  as  believers,  is  put  in  abeyance  as 
an  illegitimate  and  unscientific  prejudice,  then,  be  it  in 
the  eighteenth  century  or  to-day,  purely  historic  investi- 
gation will  yield  a  conception  of  His  nature  which  living 
faith  never  can  accept.  "  It  is  no  mere  accident," 
Eitschl  once  observed,  "  that  the  subversion  of  Jesus' 
religious  importance  has  been  attempted  under  the  guise 
of  writing  His  life."  ^ 

§  2.  Schleiermacher. — It  was  in  view  of  the  situation 
just  described  that  Friedrich  Schleiermacher  addressed 
himself  to  the  problem  of  Christology.  His  qualifications 
for  the  task  were  unrivalled.  Apart  from  a  sub-soil  of 
warm  Moravian  piety,  and  of  reverent  love  for  Jesus,  his 
^  Justification  and  Reconciliation  (Eng.  tr.),  3. 


SCHLEIERMACHER  251 

mind  had  been  enriched  by  fruitful  conceptions  of  the 
profound  significance  of  religion  in  Imman  life.  He  saw 
that  religion  is  a  thing  sui  generis,  not  to  be  swamped 
by  morality  or  confused  heedlessly  with  mere  knowledge. 
He  saw,  too,  what  the  older  nationalism  had  failed  to 
see,  that  Christianity  is  anchored  to  facts  of  the  past, 
and  that  here  lies  its  secret.  Never  was  man  more  alive 
to  the  value  of  the  Christian  fellowship  for  living  and 
authentic  Christian  faith.  He  it  was,  as  an  American 
theologian  has  finely  said,  "  who  led  the  German  Chris- 
tianity, in  its  returning  course,  to  our  Lord."  The 
absoluteness  of  the  Christian  religion  is  the  key  to  his 
view  of  its  Founder. 

Here  we  shall  confine  attention  to  the  Christology 
of  Schleiermacher's  great  dogmatic  work,  Bcr  christliche 
Glauhe  (1821-22;  second  edition,  greatly  altered,  1831), 
neglecting  his  cursory  treatment  of  the  topic  in  his 
Bcden,  issued  more  than  twenty  years  earlier.  There, 
while  acknowledging  our  vast  debt  to  Jesus,  he  had 
declined  to  recognise  Him  as  the  only  Mediator.  His 
view  of  Christianity  as  the  fleeting  expression  of  an  eternal 
ideal  debarred  him  from  assigning  a  central  and  permanent 
importance  to  the  historic  Lord.  And  Christology  is 
obviously  out  of  the  question  for  one  to  whom  Jesus 
is  but  primus  inter  pares.  At  this  point  Schleiermacher 
temporarily  approaches  the  position  of  his  later  antagonist, 
Hegel. 

Far  otherwise  is  the  tone  of  his  epoch  -  making 
treatise  on  dogmatic.  For  here  Christianity  is  defined  at 
the  very  outset  as  a  teleological  monotheism,  the  unique 
characteristic  of  which  is  this,  that  in  it  everything  is 
directly  related  to  the  redemption  accomplished  by  Jesus. 
No  longer  is  He  a  Mediator,  adapted  to  the  form  which 
the  religious  sentiment  assumes  in  Christianity ;  He  is  the 
Mediator,  final,  supreme,  transcendent.  Salvation  is  in- 
dissociable  from  His  person.  "  There  is  no  other  mode," 
he  writes,  "  in  which  one  can  come  to  have  part  in  the 
Christian  fellowship   than  through  faith   in  Jesus   as  the 


252  THE    PERSON    OF   JESUS    CHRIST 

Eedeemer."  And  progress  will  consist,  not  in  separating 
from  Him,  but  in  ever  assimilating  His  work  more 
completely. 

This  position  is  defended  by  an  argument  which, 
at  least  in  intention,  is  purely  experimental.  Here  as 
always,  he  reminds  us,  the  point  of  departure  is  the 
Christian  mind,  and  our  problem  takes  this  form :  Who 
and  what  must  Christ  have  been,  to  explain  the  state 
of  a  redeemed  soul  ?  What  are  the  dimensions  of  His 
being,  if  He  is  the  sufficient  reason  of  the  salvation  we 
now  enjoy  ?  It  is  undeniable  that  there  is  given  to  us,  as 
Christians,  a  continuous  invigoration  of  the  sense  of  God 
which  is  accompanied  by  a  rising  consciousness  of  bliss 
and  of  victory  over  the  world.  This  experience  of  re- 
demption, which  cannot  have  been  generated  accidentally, 
and  which  is  found  only  within  the  Christian  Church, 
must  have  a  cause  capable  of  producing  it.  Thus,  going 
back  by  inference  from  the  specifically  Christian  con- 
sciousness to  Him  who  evoked  it,  from  effect  to  cause, 
we  are  able  to  determine  the  quality  of  Jesus'  person.^ 
He  is  the  living  and  self-communicative  Saviour,  the 
inexhaustible  fount  and  creative  Type  of  new  life  and 
freedom  conveyed  to  all  who  trust  Him.  From  Him 
flows  a  stream  of  vital  and  vitalising  power. 

On  the  basis  of  these  experiential  facts  a  worthy 
doctrinal  superstructure  may  be  raised.  If  Christ  re- 
deems man.,  it  must  be  in  virtue  of  redemptive  forces 
resident  in  His  nature ;  if,  within  the  Christian  Church,  our 
religious  sense  is  progressively  triumphing  over  our  lower 
impulses,  it  is  because  that  triumph  was  realised  in  Jesus 
absolutely.  His  consciousness  of  God  was  such  that  it  is 
properly  described  as  a  unique  presence  of  God  in  Him, 
an  original  entrance  of  the  Divine  into  human  life.  In 
this  modified  sense,  Schleiermacher  accepts  the  ecclesias- 

^  Theologians,  of  course,  use  this  argument  by  instinct,  but  no  one  else 
has  emj)loyed  it  with  Schleiermacher's  clearness  and  tenacity.  Whether  it 
ought  to  rank  as  primary  is  another  question.  J.  H.  Skrine  gives  an 
attractive  modern  statement  of  the  principle,  Creed  and  the  Creeds,  167  ff. 


THE   SINLESSNESS    OF   JESUS  253 

tical  doctriue  of  incarnation.  And  in  that  doctrine 
be  selects  for  peculiarly  warm  and  intense  devotion  the 
sinlessness  of  Jesus.  Jesus  was  perfectly  and  absolutely 
holy.  "  Not  holy,  however,  with  a  holiness  merely 
acquired  (which  would  have  made  Him  but  a  model,  and  a 
model  incapable  of  effecting  man's  redemption),  but  with 
a  holiness  acquired — or  rather  conserved — on  the  basis 
of  inherent  holiness  (only  this  last  gives  Him  the 
creative  power  of  a  type).  Tliis  absolute  and  primary 
perfection  of  Jesus  is  simply  the  complete  and  perpetual 
triumph  in  Him  of  the  God-consciousness  over  the  sense- 
consciousness.  Thus  it  excludes  alike  every  moral  fault 
and  every  religious  error,  and  constitutes  His  divinity."  ^ 
As  the  Archetypal  Man  {Urhilcl)  He  is  a  perfect  union 
of  the  historical  individual  and  the  ideal  personality, 
crowning  the  creation  of  our  race.  Himself  creating  a  new 
race,  determined  in  personal  life,  as  He  was,  by  God. 
Type  and  history  coincide  in  Jesus ;  all  that  is  historic 
is  typical,  and  all  that  is  typical  has  become  historic. 

Schleiermacher  is  also  convinced  that  the  advent 
of  this  imique  and  archetypal  Figure  cannot  be  ex- 
plained, on  the  principle  of  uniformity,  by  His  human 
milieu.  Eather  it  is  due  to  a  creative  Divine  act ;  it  is 
a  stream  rising  from  the  deepest  fount  of  all  spiritual 
life — a  second  Divine  creation,  as  it  may  be  called, 
which  completes  the  first,  though  transcending  it,  because 
it  forms  part  of  the  same  original  Divine  idea.  Thus 
the  appearance  of  Christ  in  our  world  is  positively 
miraculous  {eine  ivunderhare  Erscheinung).  Although  the 
Virgin  Birth  is  rejected,  a  supernatural  conception  is 
strongly  affirmed  in  the  spiritual  sense  that  the  powers 
of  the  race  were  unequal  to  the  ta.sk  of  producing 
this  unparalleled  Life.  On  the  other  hand,  it  has  been 
maintained  that  for  Schleiermacher  the  being  of  our 
Lord  is  supernatural  only  in  a  relative  sense,  inasmuch 
as  the  resident  powers  of  human  nature,  the  receptivity 
of  man  for  God  -  consciousness  in  perfect  measure,  is 
^  Gaston  Frommel,  ktudes  de  Thiologie  Modcrne,  172  f. 


254  THE   PERSON    OF   JESUS    CHRIST 

regarded  as  the  second  and  equally  important  factor 
in  His  origin.^  This,  however,  is  an  objection  which 
it  is  scarcely  possible  to  sustain  except  on  grounds 
which  would  involve  a  denial  of  the  ethical  affinities  of 
God  and  man.  There  is  more  justice  in  the  criticism 
which  points  to  the  grave  diminution  of  the  contents  of  New 
Testament  faith  in  Schleiermacher's  categorical  assertion 
that  the  resurrection  and  ascension,  as  well  as  the  pre- 
diction of  Christ's  return  to  judgment,  form  no  real  part 
of  the  doctrine  of  His  person  (§  99). 

Apart  from  the  supernatural  character  thus  generally 
predicated  of  Jesus'  origin,  His  nature  was  precisely  similar 
to  ours,  and  underwent  a  precisely  similar  development. 

A  light  is  cast  on  Schleiermacher's  deeply  Christian 
conception  of  the  Saviour  by  his  mystical  view  of  His 
redeeming  work,  on  which  we  may  not  dwell.  Its  cardinal 
idea  is  that  of  vital  union  with  Christ.  It  is  by  taking 
us  up  into  the  energies  of  His  God-consciousness  and 
the  fellowship  of  His  perfect  blessedness  that  He  reconciles 
and  saves. 

The  influence  of  this  great  thinker  in  leading 
Christologians  to  start  from  a  present  experience  of 
the  new  life  as  immediately  dependent  on  Jesus  was 
closely  akin  to  that  of  the  Reformers,  and  its  depth 
and  value  can  scarcely  be  overestimated.  If,  as  so 
often  happens,  he  himself  gained  less  than  might  have 
been  hoped  from  the  new  point  of  view,  and  failed  to 
satisfy  some  deep  Christian  instincts,  this  was  owing 
to  defects  inherent  in  his  theoretic  notion  of  what 
salvation  is.  Its  relation  to  the  world  too  much  pre- 
dominates. Redeemed  men  are  men  liberated  from  the 
oppression  of  finite  causes,  and  dependent  solely  on  the 
Absolute  Causality,  rather  than  forgiven  sinners,  living 
in  fellowship  with  God  the  Father.  The  idea  of  religion 
present  in  the  Reden  still  persists.  Thus,  while  Schleier- 
macher  asserts — no  one  more  emphatically — the  central 

^  Cf.  Mulert,  Schleiermachers  geschichtsjihilosoj'hische  Ansichten,  66  ff., 
84  ff. 


DEFECTS    OF   SCHLEIERMACHER  255 

and  redeeming  place  of  Christ,  it  is  doubtful  whether  his 
speculative  presuppositions  permit  him  to  hold  such  a 
person  as  either  real  or  possible.  As  long  as  religion 
is  defined  in  impersonal  terms — as  long  as  it  is  not  seen 
to  be  communion  with  a  personal  God — it  has  not  been 
made  clear  that  its  perfected  stage  can  arrive  only  through 
a  personal  Mediator.  A  principle  may  suffice.  More- 
over, though  he  preferred  to  wreck  his  system  as  a  monistic 
structure  rather  than  tamper  with  Christ's  absolute  im- 
munity from  sin  (for  a  miracle  is  a  miracle  though  its 
sphere  be  the  soul),  he  yet  has  left  a  certain  shadow  upon 
the  genuine  humanity  of  the  Sinless  One.  Can  we  say  that 
a  Christ  from  whose  inner  life  even  the  minimum  of  moral 
conflict  is  excluded  ^  is  our  Companion  in  temptation,  our 
Brother  and  Captain  in  victory ;  is  not  what  appears  in 
Him,  as  it  has  been  put,  "  merely  the  natural  predomin- 
ance of  a  higher  principle  "  ?  ^  This  also  flows  from  the 
romantic  pantheism  which  haunted  Schleiermacher  from 
first  to  last,  and  leads  him  to  represent  Jesus'  consciousness 
of  God  more,  on  the  whole,  as  the  natural  play  of  tempera- 
ment than  as  perfect  reciprocal  fellowship  with  His  Father. 
Finally,  it  is  difficult  to  concede  that  Schleiermacher  has 
been  able  to  preserve  the  religious  truth  of  incarnation. 
Christ's  humanity,  in  his  view,  is  no  doubt  God-possessed ; 
still,  a  God-possessed  humanity  is  one  thing,  and  may 
have  degrees ;  God  manifest  in  the  flesh  is  quite  another.^ 
And  it  makes  a  difference  to  theology  when  it  falters  in 
repeating  the  words  of  St.  Paul :  "  Ye  know  the  grace  of 
our  Lord  Jesus  Christ,  that,  though  He  was  rich,  yet  for 
your  sakes  He  became  poor."  The  religious  importance 
of  Christ's  eternal  being  has  too  much  been  ignored. 

On  the  other  hand,  the  invaluable  service  of  Schleier- 
macher to  the  Christological  thinking  of  three  generations 

'  Sendschreiben  (ed.  Mulert),  22. 

2  Haering,  ut  supra,  437. 

'  Christ  is  exhibited  as  the  objective  ground  of  faith,  but  in  the  last 
resort  He  is  shown  to  us  still  more  cleaily  as  the  frd  believer.  Later 
liberalism  has  attached  itself  to  this  element  in  the  whole.  Cf.  Loofs,  RE. 
iv.  56. 


256  THE    PERSON    OF   JESUS    CHRIST 

may  be  summed  up  in  the  statement,  first,  that  he  pro- 
claimed the  advent  of  Christ  as  a  supernatural  inter- 
position, redeeming  and  Divine ;  secondly,  he  once  more 
placed  the  figure  of  Jesus  at  the  centre  of  His  own  religion. 
To  men  bred  in  the  Eationalism  of  the  eighteenth  century 
this  came  as  a  revelation,  as  life  from  the  dead.  It  opened 
to  them  a  new  world.  Christ  the  focus  of  Christianity 
— the  watchword  was  never  forgotten.  And  Schleier- 
macher's  were  the  lips  from  which  it  pealed  forth  with 
the  persuasive  charm  imparted  to  it  by  a  great  personality. 
In  the  words  with  which  Dr.  Fairbairn  closes  a  finely 
judicious  estimate :  "  In  his  religious  system  Jesus  held 
the  same  place  as  God  held  in  the  practical  system  of 
Kant;  in  the  one  case  God  was  a  necessity  to  the  con- 
science, in  the  other  Jesus  was  a  necessity  to  the  con- 
sciousness ;  but  while  the  former  had  all  the  severity  of 
an  inflexible  moral  law,  the  latter  had  all  the  beauty  and 
all  the  grace  of  the  Eedeemer  and  Saviour  of  mankind." 

§  3.  Hegel  and  his  School. — In  point  of  speculation 
Hegel  and  Schleiermacher  are  contrasted  and  antipathetic 
types ;  yet  it  would  be  easy  to  prove  a  close  relation 
between  their  conceptions  of  the  essence  of  religion.  Both 
in  fact  represent  a  view  of  life  and  the  world  inherited 
from  Goethe.  Whereas  for  the  exposition  of  this 
romanticism,  as  it  may  be  styled,  Schleiermacher  chose 
terms  of  feeling,  Hegel  construed  it  in  the  severer 
categories  of  pure  thought.  Taking  up  in  a  higher 
sense  the  tradition  of  eighteenth-century  Eationalism, 
according  to  which  Christianity  is  doctrine,  he  welcomed 
the  Christological  dogma  as  embodying  the  true  philosophy 
under  the  forms  of  imaginative  intuition,  and  setting  forth 
the  ontological  unity  of  God  and  man,  which  philosophy 
defines  by  ideas,  in  the  music  and  poetry  of  the  heart. 
Man,  he  held,  is  finite  spirit,  and  ultimately  identical  as 
such  with  Infinite  Spirit ;  not  only  so,  but,  according  to 
the  fairest  exegesis  of  Hegel's  words,  it  is  in  the  finite 
spirit    that    the    Absolute,  or    God,  first    attains    to  self- 


CHRISTOLOGY    IN    HEGEL  257 

conscionsness.  History  is  God's  self-realisation  in  and 
through  the  processes  of  human  experience ;  in  yet  more 
general  terms,  reality  is  definable  as  the  evolution  of 
Absolute  Eeason  mediated  by  nature  and  history.  There 
is  no  more  lofty  truth  than  that  God  and  man,  so  far 
from  being  disparate  in  essence,  are  a  rational  and  intrinsic 
unity.  Eeligion,  inferior  to  philosophy  as  an  exponent 
of  this  unity,  still  does  its  best  to  get  it  expressed,  and 
in  pictorial  fashion  the  thing  is  accomplished  in  the 
ecclesiastical  dogma  of  the  God-man. 

On  these  terms  Hegel  showed  himself  more  than 
ready  to  maintain  friendly  relations  with  the  Church's 
creed.  He  saw  his  way  to  put  such  a  meaning  upon 
doctrines  like  our  Lord's  deity  or  atonement  as  would 
admit  them  to  an  important  and  even  an  essential  place 
in  his  highly  speculative  construction.  Of  course  there 
was  a  price  to  pay.  The  significance  of  the  historic  Jesus 
has  been  misconceived,  and  readjustment  is  essential. 
What  the  Church  predicates  of  Him  is,  properly,  a  symbol ; 
but  a  symbol  of  a  vast  metaphysical  idea.  It  is  through 
its  aid  that  faith  in  the  God-manhood  has  arisen,  and 
the  world  been  educated  to  perceive  the  truth  of  racial  or 
imiversal  incarnation,  according  to  which  the  life  of  man 
is  God's  life  in  the  form  of  time,  and  the  Divine  and 
human  natures,  being  related  as  universal  and  particular, 
realise  themselves  only  in  organic  unity  with  each 
other.  The  death,  resurrection,  and  exaltation  of  Jesus 
are  grand  pictures  of  ontological  ideas ;  they  speak  to 
us  of  the  fact  that  man,  viewed  merely  in  his  alienat- 
ing finitude,  is  the  prey  of  negation  and  dissolution, 
whereas  if  envisaged  in  his  proper  unity  with  the  Infinite 
he  takes  high  rank  in  the  total  process  of  the  world. 
"  This  essential  unity  must  be  presented  to  the  conscious- 
ness or  interpreted  to  the  experience  of  man  by  a  manifest 
fact  or  sensuous  reality  in  order  that  he  may  through 
knowledge  attain  to  union.  In  other  words,  in  order  to 
save  man  from  his  state  of  division  and  estrangement, 
God  must  '  in  an  objective  manner '  enter  this  empirical 
17 


258  THE    PERSON    OF    JESUS    CHRIST 

or  sensuous  present  as  man's  equal  or  fellow,  and  so  cause 
it  to  appear — and  appearance  is  always  for  another,  and 
the  other  is  here  the  Church  or  the  society  of  faith^ — that 
the  Divine  and  the  human  natures  are  not  in  themselves 
different,  but  really  alike,  akin,  able  to  be  in  the  unity 
of  a  person."  ^  At  times,  indeed,  it  seems  as  if  Hegel's 
attitude  to  the  Church  doctrine  were  genuinely  positive  ; 
yet  the  progress  of  the  discussion  unfailingly  brings  out 
the  fact  that  he  was  much  less  interested  in  Jesus  than 
in  what  was  believed  about  Him.  And  these  beliefs 
are  but  man's  stammering  utterance  of  metaphysical 
theorems.  Human  history  is  the  process  of  God's 
becoming,  the  self-unfolding  of  Eeason  under  conditions 
of  space  and  time ;  and  in  this  sense,  but  no  other,  the 
Word  became  flesh  and  dwelt  among  us.  "  The  history  of 
Christ  is  the  visible  reconciliation  between  man  and  the 
eternal.  With  the  death  of  Christ  this  union,  ceasing  to 
be  a  fact,  becomes  a  vital  idea — the  Spirit  of  God  which 
dwells  in  the  Christian  community."  ^  It  is  from  this 
side  that  Hegel  contemplates  the  doctrine  of  the  Trinity. 
The  Son  of  God  is  the  finite  world  of  nature  and  man, 
which  is  estranged  from  its  Father,  and  must  be  again 
resumed  into  essential  harmony. 

It  would  be  unfair  to  say  that  in  this  scheme  Jesus  is 
deprived  of  all  importance,  for  He  is  held  to  have  been 
the  first  to  realise  the  great  speculative  principle  for  which 
the  Christian  religion  stands.  If  not  Himself  the  God- 
man,  He  first  perceived  that  God  and  man  are  one.  Thus 
far  Hegel  transcended  the  unhistorical  naivete  of  the 
eighteenth  century.  But  it  is  clear  that,  apart  from  this 
casual  chronological  relationship,  Christian  doctrine,  in  its 
revised  and  sublimated  form,  has  no  longer  any  particular 
connection  with  the  historic  Christ.  Christianity  receives 
absolute  rank,  but  at  the  cost  of  its  tie  with  history. 
For  only  the  world-process  as  a  whole,  and  no  single 
point    or    person    in    it,    can    be    the    true    manifestation 

^  Fairhaini,  Christ  in  ^fodern  Theology,  220. 

*  W.  Wallace,  JEncycIopcedia  Brilannica,  art.  "  Hegel." 


CHRISTOLOGY    IN    HEGEL  259 

of  the  Absolute.  Hence,  to  quote  Hegel's  unequivocal 
lancTuage,  "  Christology  affirms  simply  that  God  comes  to 
be  Spirit  {Geist  loird),  and  this  can  take  place  only  in 
finite  spirit,  in  man ;  in  whom  there  arises  the  conscious- 
ness of  the  Absolute,  and  who  then  is  likewise  the 
Absolute's  consciousness  of  itself."  Thus,  when  Hegel  has 
waved  his  wand,  and  uttered  his  dialectical  and  all-decisive 
formula,  a  change  comes  over  the  spirit  of  the  believer's 
dream ;  everything  appears  to  be  as  Christian  as  before, 
yet  instinctively  we  are  aware  that  nothing  specifically 
Christian  is  left.  Doctrines  which  as  translated  into  the 
language  of  the  notion  show  as  high  philosopliical  truths, 
and  have  the  air  of  exhibiting  the  Christian  as  an  imper- 
fectly self-conscious  Hegelian,  turn  out  to  have  no  relation, 
other  than  one  which  is  accidental,  to  facts  of  the  past. 
All  we  need  say  is  that  to  believe  this  does  not  matter 
is  a  departure  from  Christian  ground.  When  once  the 
Gospel  has  been  severed  from  a  historic  person,  and 
identified  with  a  complex  of  metaphysical  ideas,  what  it 
ought  to  be  called  is  scarcely  worth  discussion ;  that  it 
is  no  longer  Christianity  is  clear. 

At  the  same  time,  a  philosophical  achievement  of  such 
real  magnitude  as  Hegelianism  could  not  but  leave  a 
deep  permanent  mark  on  theology.  Certain  minds,  it  is 
true,  became  so  intoxicated  by  the  new  system  as  to 
find  it  scarcely  credible  that  the  world  could  ever  get 
beyond  it.  Men  like  Daub,  Marheineke,  Goeschel  and 
Eosenkranz  handed  on  the  Hegelian  tradition  with  ardour, 
the  result  in  some  cases  being — not  unnaturally,  if  we 
recollect  what  in  one  sense  was  the  strongly  conservative 
bent  of  Hegel's  mind — to  bring  to  the  surface  once  more 
the  pure  intellectualistic  orthodoxy  of  a  former  age. 
Even  those  who  maintained  a  critical  attitude,  however, 
made  sincere  though  timorous  efforts  to  demonstrate  the 
necessity  for  the  supreme  idea  of  God-manhood  having 
actualised  itself  in  a  single  personal  life.  It  was  urged 
that  Incarnation  must  take  the  form  of  incarnation  in  one 
person,  if  it  was  to  be  more  than  an  abstract  conception. 


260  THE   PERSON    OF   JESUS    CHRIST 

"  The  idea  that  in  humanity  we  see  Christ,"  said  Eosen- 
kranz,  "  receives  its  full  truth  only  through  the  mediation 
of  God's  absolute  incarnation  in  the  person  of  Jesus."  But 
Marheineke  revived  the  master's  tendency  to  substitute 
"  humanity "  for  Christ  in  all  propositions  asserted  by 
the  Church  of  her  Lord.  "  In  the  Ascension,"  he  writes, 
"  we  are  taught  that  religion,  originating  as  it  does  in  God, 
has  no  abiding  place  here  on  earth,  but  necessarily  and 
eternally  returns  again  whence  it  took  its  rise."  Evidently 
this  is  a  mode  of  thought  already  trembling  on  the  verge 
of  a  Eationalism  hardly  distinguishable  from  that  older 
type  on  which  Hegel  had  earlier  poured  his  indignant  scorn. 
Sooner  or  later,  then,  some  one  was  bound  to  speak  out, 
and  expose  the  hollow  and  precarious  alliance  which  had 
been  proclaimed  between  the  Christian  faith  and  dialectic 
pantheism.  The  word  which  broke  the  spell  came  from 
Strauss. 

According  to  Strauss  the  received  Gospel  history  is 
in  the  main  a  collection  of  myths  gradually  accumulated 
in  the  early  Christian  society,  a  wreath  set  on  the 
Master's  brow  by  reverent  and  loving  fancy.  Little  of  a 
historical  kind  is  ascertainable  about  Jesus  Himself,  and 
that  little  is  in  any  case  totally  incapable  of  sustaining 
the  weight  of  Christological  dogma.  In  point  of  fact,  not 
scientific  thought  but  religious  imagination  is  responsible 
for  the  identifying  of  a  Divine  humanity  with  the  person 
of  Jesus ;  for  while  Jesus  was  unquestionably  the  pioneer 
who  first  grasped  the  thought  that  deity  and  humanity 
are  in  essence  one,  yet  the  Christ  of  faith  (by  which  is 
meant  not  the  historic  actuality  of  incarnation  but  the 
abstract  notion)  is  in  no  sense  coincident  with  any  specific 
individual.  In  words  that  soon  became  famous,  Strauss 
declared  that  "  the  Idea  loves  not  to  pour  all  its  fulness 
into  one  example,  in  jealousy  towards  all  the  rest.  Only 
the  race  answers  to  the  Idea."  ^  What  was  meant  for 
mankind  must  not  be  narrowed  into  a  monopoly. 

In  spite  of   these   brave   words,  Strauss   felt   himself 

^  Leben  Jesu  (1835),  §  147.    This  fornuila  has  made  a  jnofound  impression. 


STRAUSS'   LEBEN  JESU  2G1 

compelled  by  tlie  critics  of  his  Lehcn  Jcsu  to  make  large 
concessions  in  regard  to  the  creative  power  of  the  historic 
person  whom  we  name  Jesus  Christ.  If  he  had  tended 
previously  to  contemplate  Him  as  no  more  than  the 
vehicle  of  an  idea,  something  of  Jesus'  actual  greatness 
now  seemed  to  break  on  him,  at  least  temporarily ;  and 
he  commits  himself  to  the  statement  that  in  religion 
Christ  is  not  merely  unsurpassed  but  unsurpassable,  so 
that  we  have  no  option  but  to  regard  Him  as  in  fact 
the  founder  of  the  Christian  religion.  Great  personalities 
stand  at  the  source  of  all  new  religious  epochs ;  can 
Christianity  be  an  exception  ?  These  admissions  may 
strike  us,  perhaps,  as  grudging  and  unimportant ;  but,  as 
Faut  remarks,  "  what  is  interesting  in  this  confession  is, 
first,  the  argument  from  effect  to  cause,  which  had  been 
decisive  for  Schleiermacher's  Christology,  and  next  the 
acknowledgment  that  a  person,  not  an  idea,  must  have 
been  the  source  of  Christianity."  But  even  this  admission 
was  wrung  from  Strauss  at  the  sword's  point ;  and  he 
followed  it  up  with  explanations  which  clearly  proved,  if 
proof  were  needed,  that  he  was  still  as  far  as  ever  from 
the  Christian  attitude  to  Jesus. 

Though  we  can  no  longer  believe  in  Jesus,  he 
continues,  it  is  vitally  important  that  we  should  retain 
the  Christological  dogma,  provided  only  we  explain 
to  ourselves  carefully  what  it  means.  Worthless  for 
history,  it  has  all  the  greater  value  for  speculation.  Thus 
many  items  in  the  gospel  narrative — the  supernatural 
birth  of  Jesus,  His  miracles,  His  resurrection  and  ascension 
—remain  as  eternally  valid  truths.  They  remain,  in  other 
words,  as  timeless  symbols  of  a  metaphysical  idea.  "  Con- 
ceived as  in  an  individual,  a  God-man,  the  attributes  and 
functions  which  Church  doctrine  ascribes  to  Christ  are 
mutually  contradictory ;  in  the  idea  of  the  race  they 
harmonise."  "  Humanity  is  the  union  of  two  natures, 
the  incarnate  God,  the  Infinite  Spirit  reducing  itself  to 
finite  measures,  and  the  finite  Spirit  recalling  its  infinity. 
Humanity    is   the   child   of    the    visible    mother    and    the 


262  THE    PERSON   OF    JESUS    CHKIST 

invisible  Spirit;  it  is  the  Sinless  One,  inasmuch  as  its 
evolution-story  is  witliout  spot  or  blenjish,  and  the 
impurity  that  always  clings  merely  to  the  individual  is 
sublated  in  the  race  and  its  career.  Humanity  is  the 
Dying  One  who  rises  again  and  ascends  to  heaven,  inas- 
much as  it  draws  an  ever-higher  life  from  the  negation  of 
its  natural  existence."  ^  Christianity,  in  brief,  is  the  final 
refutation  of  all  dualism,  the  perfect  expression  of  pure 
monistic  immanence.  Moving  always  within  the  ideal 
world,  it  is  superior  to  history. 

The  only  thing  to  be  done  with  most  of  this  is  to 
deny  it  firmly.  It  ought  to  be  clear  by  this  time  that 
the  proposed  identification  of  the  Christian  faith  with  the 
ontological  theory  that  God  and  man  are  one — God  the 
essence  of  man,  man  the  actuality  of  God — is  an  utterly 
hopeless  enterprise,  which  the  scientific  historian  cannot 
take  seriously.  For  it  conflicts  with  the  elementary  fact 
that  the  Church  existed,  and  knew  itself  to  be  redeemed 
by  Jesus,  long  before  the  Christological  dogma  thus 
metaphysically  canonised  by  Strauss  had  come  to  be. 
Faith  was  the  parent  of  dogma,  not  its  child.  The  truth 
is  that  the  very  idea  of  religion  as  consisting  in  personal 
fellowship  with  God  had  faded  from  Strauss'  mind,  and 
with  its  disappearance  went  also  in  large  measure  the 
power  to  sympathise  with,  or  appreciate,  essential  Christian 
piety  as  it  existed  from  the  first. 

We  turn  now  to  the  systematic  theologian  in  whom 
we  see  Hegelianism  at  its  best,  Biedermann  of  Zurich. 
Actuated  by  a  sincere  and  positive  interest  in  Chris- 
tianity, he  desired  to  construct  a  theological  system 
which  faith  might  safely  accept ;  but  he  meant  to  do  so 
exclusively  with  materials  drawn  from,  or  at  least  coloured 
by,  the  monistic  philosophy  he  had  learnt  from  Hegel. 
Eeligion  as  such  he  conceived,  in  opposition  to  Strauss, 
as  an  objectively  real  interrelation  of  God  and  man, 
the  Infinite  Spirit  and  the  finite ;  a  view,  he  considered, 
equally  antagonistic  to  dualism  and  pantheism.  And  while 
*  Glauienslehre^,  ii,  740. 


BIEDERMANN  263 

faith  has  its  own  real  place,  and  is  not  to  be  uinvorthily 
defined  as  inferior  to  pure  thought  even  from  the  point 
of  view  of  religion  itself,  the  task  of  theology  is  to  raise 
it  to  the  plane  of  completely  self-conscious  knowledge, 
so  reducing  its  naiver  utterances  to  philosophic  and 
permanently  valuable  terms.  We  mny  be  briefer  in  our 
account  of  Biedermann,  because,  with  that  monotony  of 
phrase  which  afflicts  so  much  Hegelian  writing,  he  is 
perpetually  recurring  to  one  or  two  speculative  axioms, 
which  have  already  come  before  us.  The  keynote  of 
his  Christology  is  the  explicit  distinction  between  the 
principle  of  redemption  and  the  person  of  the  Eedeemer. 
Strauss,  he  holds,  was  justified  in  his  complaint  that  the 
Church  wrongly  predicates  of  Jesus  what  in  point  of  fact 
is  true  only  of  Divine-humanity.  But  a  dogma  which,  as 
interpreted  of  Jesus,  is  logically  self-destructive,  is  never- 
theless grandly  true  of  the  ontological  unity  of  God  and 
man.  God  and  man  are  distinct  in  nature,  but  they  are 
one  in  existence ;  one,  as  the  Chalcedonian  Creed  puts 
it,  without  confusion,  without  mutation,  without  division, 
without  severance.  To  speculative  thought,  accordingly, 
the  incarnation  is  no  single  event,  capable  of  being  assigned 
to  a  specific  time ;  it  is  an  eternal  fact,  an  unbeginning 
and  unending  factor  in  the  life  of  God.  Similarly,  the 
atonement  is  no  temporarily  performed  act,  but  God's 
timeless  process  of  self-reconciliation,  while  the  resurrec- 
tion and  ascension  represent  the  eternal  regress  of  Absolute 
Spirit  to  itself  by  way  of  finite  being.  In  short,  the 
Christ-principle,  as  it  may  be  called,  is  but  the  religious 
expression  of  the  fact  that  Infinite  and  finite  Spirit, 
although  distinct  in  essence,  exist  in  a  vital  metaphysical 
reciprocity.  With  this  alone  dogmatic  is  concerned.  On 
the  other  hand,  dogmatic  proper  has  nothing  to  do  with 
the  Christ-person,  the  historic  Jesus.  As  the  Founder  of 
the  Christian  religion  He  belongs  to  the  sphere  of  history  ; 
He  is  subject,  not  object,  of  the  Christian  faith.^ 

>  The  position  takeu  by  Dr.  Edward  Caird,  in  his  Evolution  of  Religion, 
is  very  much  that  of  Biedermann.     Thus  he  writes  :  "By  Him  (Jesus)  as 


264  THE    PERSON    OF   JESUS    CHRIST 

None  the  less,  Biedermaun  makes  a  persistent  and  in 
some  ways  a  deeply  impressive  effort  to  combine  principle 
and  person  in  a  more  living  unity.  If  not  identical 
with  the  principle  of  redemption,  Jesus  was  yet  the  first 
to  become  conscious  of  it,  and  to  make  it  known.  Hence 
the  relation  between  principle  and  person,  though  at 
first  defined  loosely  enough,  is  not  after  all  outward  and 
accidental ;  it  is  inward  and  abiding,  for  without  the 
mediation  of  Christ  the  principle  could  not  have  realised 
itself  in  fact.  Biedermann  never  succeeded  in  overcoming 
this  inconsistency  between  his  initial  separation  of  prin- 
ciple and  person  in  dbstrado,  and  his  later  admission  that 
in  concrete  fact  they  are  indissolubly  bound  up  together. 
He  was  also  hampered  by  an  imperfect  conception  of  the 
personality  of  God,  and  of  the  resulting  nature  of  religion, 
for  in  his  pages  the  Divine  sonship  which  it  was  Christ's 
function  to  reveal  hovers  ambiguously  between  the  idea  of 
personal  and  ethical  communion  with  the  Father  and  a 
purely  ontological  relation  of  finite  to  Infinite  Spirit. 

In  general  it  may  be  concluded  that  Hegelianism 
tended  to  commit  a  grave  offence  against  history  by 
construing  Christianity  as  a  system  of  ideas  which  is 
intelligible  and  effective  apart  from  Jesus  Christ.  Strauss 
took  this  position  frankly,  but  its  influence  is  seen  even 
in  the  more  moderate  theories  of  Biedermaun.  On  the 
other  hand,  Hegel  rendered  the  Church  an  easily  forgotten 
service  by  stimulating  an  inteuser  reflection  upon 
Christological  problems  in  their  universal  aspect. 

§  4.  The  Kenotic  Theories. — In  the  first  quarter  of  last 
century,  a  union  of  the  Lutheran  and  Eeformed  Churches 
in  Germany  was  projected  in  connection  with  which  arose 
a  novel  and  remarkable  type    of    Christological  doctrine. 

by  no  other  individual  before,  the  pure  idea  of  a  Divine  humanity  was 
apprehended  and  made  into  the  great  principle  of  life  ;  and  consequently, 
in  so  far  as  that  idea  can  be  regarded  as  realised  in  an  individual, — and  it 
was  a  necessity  of  feeling  and  imagination  that  it  should  be  regarded  as 
so  realised, — in  no  other  could  it  find  so  pure  an  embodiment"  (quoted 
by  Dr.  Forrest,  Christ  of  Hidory  and  of  Experience,  305). 


KENOTIC   THEORIES  2G5 

From  the  well-known  passage  in  Pliilipi)ians,  which  ilgured 
prominently  in  the  discussion,  these  theories  came  to  be 
styled  Kenotic,^  and  their  differential  feature,  as  it  has 
been  put,  is  that  they  seek  "to  do  justice  to  the  truth 
that  the  Incarnation  of  tlie  Son  involved  a  real  self- 
limitation  of  His  Divine  mode  of  existence,"  I  think  the 
origin  of  the  name  has  occasionally  been  forgotten  by  those 
who  profess  to  explain  the  motives  by  which  the  authors 
of  these  views  were  actuated.  Tlie  suggestion  has  fre- 
quently been  made  that  the  object  of  the  Kenotic  theories 
was  to  signalise  tlie  reality  and  integrity  of  our  Lord's 
manhood,  and  obviously  this  is  one  of  the  fundamental 
principles  of  their  method.  Like  other  moderns,  they  had 
been  taught  by  recent  study  of  the  Gospels  that  Jesus, 
whatever  more,  was  truly  our  fellow-man.  But,  over  and 
beyond  this,  they  were  also  bent  on  bringing  out  the 
wondrous  nature  and  subduing  magnitude  of  the  Divine 
sacrifice ;  and  in  this  connection  they  wished  to  throw 
into  strong  relief  the  exceeding  greatness  of  the  step  down- 
wards taken  by  the  Son  of  God  when  for  our  sakes, 
though  rich,  He  became  poor.  It  was  as  if  they  said,  not 
merely,  This  is  wdiat  in  love  He  came  to  be ;  but,  Even 
this  which  He  became  is  unintelligible  except  by  contrast 
with  what  He  had  been.  He  did  not  remain  all  that  He 
was  in  the  pre-existent  glory,  but  stooped  down,  by  a 
real  surrender  and  self-impoverishment,  and  took  a  lower 
place.  In  the  light  of  that  renunciation  we  gain  a  new 
glimpse  of  the  lengths  to  which  Divine  love  will  go  for 
man's  redemption.  This  I  believe  to  be  the  profoundest 
motive  operating  in  the  Kenotic  theories — this  sense  of 
sacrifice  on  the  part  of  a  pre-existent  One ;  and  it  is  a 

^  Dr.  Forrest  has  justly  jjointed  out  that  the  word  Kenotic  must  not  be 
taken  as  implying  that  "the  truth  in  this  matter  rests  on  a  particular 
exegesis  of  this  single  passage  in  Philippians  (2^'^')."  Its  basis  in  the  New 
Testament  is  in  reality  far  wider.  "The  Pauline  expressions  as  to  the  self- 
emptying  or  self-impoverishment  (2  Co  8^)  of  the  Son  only  empliasise 
what  the  narratives  of  Christ's  life  suggest,  and  their  elimination  would  leave 
the  problem  as  presented  in  the  Gospels  precisely  where  it  was"  (AiUhurity 
of  Chi-id,  98), 


266  THE    PERSON    OF   JESUS    CHRIST 

conception  notoriously  absent  from  the  Christological 
arguments  of  not  a  few  who  have  criticised  these  theories 
with  great  severity. 

The  Kenotic  theologians,  one  and  all,  proceed  upon 
orthodox  assumptions  as  to  the  Triaity  and  the  two 
natures  present  in  the  one  person  of  our  Lord.  Their 
object  is  to  show  how  the  Second  Person  of  the  Trinity 
could  so  enter  into  human  life  as  that  there  resulted  the 
genuinely  human  experience  which  is  described  by  the 
evangelists.  To  this  problem  they  are  unanimous  in 
replying — of  course  with  individual  variations — that  the 
eternal  Logos  by  a  wonderful  suspension  or  restriction 
of  His  Divine  activities  reduced  Himself  within  the  limits 
and  conditions  of  manhood.  Somehow  He  laid  aside  His 
Divine  mode  of  existence  in  order  to  become  man. 
Thomasius  of  Erlangen,  the  greatest  name  of  this  school, 
followed  the  earlier  hints  of  Sartorius  in  rejecting  the 
traditions  of  Lutheran  exegesis  as  to  the  Philippian 
passage  in  so  far  as  he  maintained  that  the  self-emptying 
there  affirmed  has  relation,  not  to  the  incarnate,  but  to  the 
pre-existent  Christ.  The  Logos,  he  writes,  renounced  the 
fulness  of  His  Divine  being  in  all  those  relations  in  which 
He  reveals  Himself  ad  extra,  lowered  Himself  to  become 
the  substratum  of  a  real  human  personality,  exchanged 
His  Divine  consciousness  for  one  that  was  human,  or 
rather  Divine-human  ;  and  thus  became  capable  of  forming 
the  centre  of  a  single  personal  Life.  Further,  we  may 
construe  this  Life  as  undergoing  a  veritably  human 
development,  inasmuch  as  the  Logos  had  voluntarily 
contracted  His  life  to  the  form  and  dimensions  of  human 
existence,  submitting  to  the  laws  of  human  growth  and 
preserving  His  absolute  powers  only  in  the  measure  in 
which  they  were  essential  to  His  redeeming  work ;  and 
at  the  close  of  His  earthly  career  He  resumed  once  more 
the  glory  He  had  laid  aside.  Thomasius  was  at  one  with 
previous  Lutheran  Christology  in  holding  that  there  is 
no  presence  or  activity  of  the  incarnate  Son  outside  of 
His  human  nature ;  and  he  argues  that  by  the  addition  of 


THOMASIUS  2G7 

the  genus  fnpcinoticum — according  to  which  the  attributes 
of  the  humanity  were  transferred  to,  and  imposed  limits 
upon,  the  divinity — completeness  was  for  the  first  time 
given  to  the  older  theory  of  the  coinmunicatio  idiomatum} 
He  replied  to  the  objection  that  his  view  conflicts  with 
the  doctrine  of  the  Divine  immutability  ^  by  insisting  on  an 
important  distinction  between  the  essential  or  immanent 
attributes  of  Godhead,  which  cannot  be  held  in  suspense, 
namely,  truth,  holiness,  and  love,  and  attributes — such  as 
omnipotence,  omnipresence,  omniscience — which  are  re- 
lative to  the  world  and  so  far  external.  These  last, 
lacking  in  the  historic  Christ,  do  not  in  strictness  belong 
to  the  essence  of  God,  but  are  evoked  by  His  relation 
to  the  world ;  holiness,  love,  and  truth,  on  the  other 
hand,  constitute  the  very  being  of  deity,  and  it  is  pre- 
cisely tliey  which  are  incarnate  in  our  Lord.  This  may 
be  taken  as  the  classic  form  of  the  Kenotic  theory,^ 
but  it  appears  in  a  still  more  thorougligoing  shape  in 
Gess,  who  extends  the  Tcenosis  to  immanent  attributes 
also.  The  self-depotentiation  of  the  Logos  is  absolute : 
"  He  reduces  Himself  to  the  germ  of  a  human  soul."  He 
suffered  the  extinction  of  His  eternal  self-consciousness, 
to  regain  it  after  many  months  as  a  human,  variable 
consciousness,  subject  to  the  processes  of  gradual  develop- 
ment, and  sometimes — as  in  childhood,  sleep,  and  death — • 
involving  no  self-consciousness  at  all.  Step  by  step 
Christ  came  to  know  who  He  really  was.  Nay,  Gess 
does  not  shrink  from  adding  that  the  incarnation  affected 
tlie    internal    relations    of     the    Trinity,    for    during    the 

1  Cf.  Loofs'  article  '  Kenosis,'  RE.  x.  246  S. 

^  Dorner  especially  took  tins  point. 

'  It  was  expounded  by  Thomasius  first  in  his  Beitrdge  zur  kirchlichen 
Christologie  (1845),  but  the  fullest  and  most  attractive  statement  is  his 
Chrisii  Person  und  Werh  (1853-61),  particularly  the  second  volume.  His 
main  principles  were  accepted  by  Lutherans  like  Kahnis,  Luthardt,  and 
Delitzsch,  and  by  Eeformed  divines  like  Ebrard  and  Godet,  while  in  this 
country  they  have  won  a  modified  approval  from  writers  like  Fairbairn,  Gore, 
and  Forrest.  The  most  valuable  English  account  and  criticism  of  the  chief 
writers  and  their  views  will  be  found  in  Bruce's  Hinniliation  of  Chrut, 
Lecture  iv. 


268  THE    PERSON    OF   JESUS    CHRIST 

period  covered  by  the  earthly  life  we  must  conceive  the 
eternal  generation  of  the  Son  by  the  Father,  and  the 
cosmic  functions  of  the  Son  to  have  undergone  a  temporary 
interruption.  Godet,  in  his  commentary  on  the  Fourth 
Gospel,  takes  much  the  same  line.  In  respect  of  the 
incarnate  life  he  draws  a  sharp  distinction  between  Christ's 
filial  conscioiisness,  which  re-awoke  at  His  baptism,  and  the 
filial  state — i.e.  the  Divine  "  form  of  God,"  the  mode  of 
existence  answering  to  His  true  being — which  He  only 
regained  at  the  ascension.  And  the  problem  of  the  cosmic 
functions  of  the  Son,  ex  hypothesi  suspended  for  a  time, 
he  solves  by  the  statement  that  "  when  the  Logos  descends 
into  the  world,  there  to  become  one  of  the  beings  of  the 
universe,  the  Father  can  enter  into  direct  relation  to  the 
world,  and  Himself  exercise  the  functions  of  Creator  and 
Preserver,  which  He  commonly  exercises  through  the 
mediation  of  the  Word."  ^ 

The  theory  of  Gess  in  a  special  measure  drew  forth 
vehement  and  often  scornful  condemnation.  This  con- 
ception of  a  human  soul-germ  which  gradually  evolves 
into  identity  with  the  Logos,  of  the  second  Person  of  the 
Trinity  first  denuded  of  all  the  properties  of  Godhead, 
save  its  bare  essence,  but  ultimately  restored  to  the  plenary 
possession  of  all  His  attributes,  was  contemptuously  de- 
scribed as  pure  mythology,  which  it  required  "  a  kenosis 
of  the  understanding"  to  believe.^  To  the  objection  of 
orthodox  critics,  however,  that  what  we  reach  in  Jesus 
on  Kenotic  principles  is  a  merely  human  conscious  life,  the 
answer  may  reasonably  be  given,  that  on  any  terms  the 
experience  of  Jesus  transcends  that  of  other  men  in  so  far 
as  He  is  aware  that  once  He  was  more  than  man  and  will 
some  day  return  to  His  former  high  estate.  "  It  is  the 
paradox  of  His  unique  consciousness  that  He  who  exists 
as  man  knows  Himself  to  be  God,  and  remembers  the  time 
when  He  exercised  the  attributes  of  power  and  knowledge 
which  for  the  time  being  He  has  laid  aside." 

While    admitting    that     on    the    whole     ecclesiastical 
*  See  his  Commentary  on  St.  John,  i.  358  ff.,  394  ff.  ^  Biedermann. 


CRITICS    OF    KENOTICISM  269 

decisions  in  the  early  centuries  were  against  him, 
Thomasius  nevertheless  maintained  tliat  in  such  writers 
as  Ignatius,  Tertullian,  Origen,  and  Hilary  he  found  so 
many  points  of  real  contact  witli  his  own  theory  that 
Kenoticism  might  in  a  sense  be  described  as  the  long- 
delayed  fulfilment  of  ancient  tendencies.  In  an  import- 
ant article  Loofs  has  scrutinised  the  justice  of  this  claim.^ 
It  must  be  conceded  that  he  destroys  the  case  for  regard- 
ing the  Kenotic  theory  as  the  logical  climax  or  consistent 
outcome  of  past  Christological  development.  No  one 
would  dream  of  saying  that  the  Fathers  had  even  begun 
to  look  in  the  direction  of  a  Kenotic  theory.  At  the 
same  time  I  am  not  convinced  that  writers  like  Ignatius, 
Irenaeus,  and  Hilary  did  not  give  intermittent  expres- 
sion to  great  religious  intuitions  which,  if  consistently 
developed,  would  have  led  them  more  or  less  in  the 
direction  of  the  modern  view,  though  in  point  of  fact  they 
at  once  neutralised  the  force  of  these  expressions  by 
counter-statements  of  a  more  traditional  cast.  Whenever 
they  shake  off  the  haunting  docetism  that  pervades  so 
much  of  their  reflection  on  the  historic  Christ,  and  take 
the  idea  of  incarnation  seriously,  it  is  to  this  side  that 
their  best  thoughts  incline.  But  in  truth  it  is  of  com- 
paratively slight  importance  whether  the  Kenotic  writers 
at  first  exaggerated  their  claim  to  historic  orthodoxy,  pro- 
vided they  can  appeal  to  the  recorded  facts  and  believing 
witness  of  the  New  Testament,  not,  of  course,  for  the 
details  of  a  theory,  but  for  the  great  religious  idea  they 
have  striven  to  set  forth.  It  is  only  in  the  eyes  of  those 
who  deem  patristic  Christology  wholly  superior  to  revision 
or  amendment  that  the  alleged  defective  orthodoxy  of 
Thomasius  and  his  adherents  will  seem  a  grave  offence. 
At  a  later  stage  of  this  work  I  shall  attempt  to  deal 

'  RE.  X.  246  ff.  The  subject  is  discussed  also  by  Harnack,  Dogmen- 
geschichte*,  i.  215  ;  Thomasius,  Christi  Person  und  Wcrk,  ii.  160-76,  and 
Dogmengescliichte  ^  (ed.  Bonwetsch),  i.  374-75;  Bethune-B  iker,  History  of 
Doctriiie,  297  ff.  On  tlie  Eenotic  elements  in  Luther,  see  Th.  Haruack, 
Luthert  Theologie,  ii.  204  If. 


270  THE    PERSON    OF   JESUS    CHRIST 

more  at  length  with  the  general  import  and  religious 
value  of  what  may  be  called  "  the  Keuotic  principle " ; 
there  is  space  here  only  to  notice  one  or  two  of  the  more 
usual  criticisms.  The  most  frequent  and  at  first  sight 
the  most  damaging  objection  to  the  Kenotic  doctrine  is 
that  it  contravenes  the  fundamental  axiom  of  the  Divine 
immutability.  The  doctrine  of  the  Divine  immutability, 
however,  when  used  in  d  priori  fashion,  is  apt  to  prove 
a  weapon  we  grasp  by  the  blade.  If  we  hold  with 
conviction  that  Jesus  is  one  in  whom  God  Himself  enters 
humanity,  then  He  does  so  either  with  all  His  attributes 
unmodified,  or  in  such  wise  as  to  manifest  only  those 
qualities  which  are  compatible  with  a  real  human  life ; 
and  which  of  these  alternatives  we  shall  adopt  is  of 
course  settled  for  us  by  the  actual  facts  contained  in  the 
historic  record.  To  say  that  we  cannot  think  away  a 
single  Divine  attribute  without  destroying  God  is  not  only 
a  statement  so  abstract  as  to  be  inapplicable,  at  least 
directly,  to  the  concrete  problem  before  us ;  it  is  a 
principle  which  only  needs  to  be  rigorously  enforced 
to  discredit  every  view  of  incarnation.  But  if  wo  find 
reasons  in  the  Gospel  narrative  for  hailing  Christ  as  the 
incarnate  Son  of  God^reasons  which  have  nothing  to  do 
with  any  supposed  possession  on  His  part  of  all  the 
Divine  prerogatives  in  their  fulness — we  must  repel  the 
objection  that  He  cannot  be  God  because  He  is  neither 
omniscient  nor  omnipresent. 

It  is  a  more  recondite  form  of  the  same  criticism  to 
urge  that  a  temporary  cessation  alike  of  the  cosmic 
functions  of  the  Son  and  of  His  participation  in  the 
eternal  life  of  the  Godhead,  as  implied  in  the  theory  of 
Gess  or  Godet,  is  inherently  unthinkable.  I  have  no 
wish  to  minimise  the  seriousness  of  this ;  but  there  are 
two  considerations  which,  I  think,  may  reasonably  be  held 
to  mitigate  the  difficulty.  In  the  first  place,  the 
Trinitarian  assumptions  which  lie  behind  the  objection 
are  too  often  of  a  kind  that  go  perilously  near  the  verge 
of    tritheism,   in    so    far    as    it    is    presupposed   that  the 


DIVINE    IMMUTABILITY  271 

Divine  relation  to  the  universe  can  only  be  sustained  by 
the  Son  in  His  distinct  being,  and  is  threatened  with 
collapse  by  His  withdrawal.  A  more  Christian  view  of 
the  unity  of  Godhead  largely  modifies  the  gravity  of  the 
problem.  Secondly,  those  who  hold  that  the  self- 
limitation  of  the  Son  in  becoming  man  was  real  are  in 
no  way  bound  to  provide  a  solution  of  remoter  questions. 
We  are  free  to  believe,  on  the  evidence  of  history, 
that  the  life  of  the  incarnate  Son  was  in  harmony  with 
the  conditions  of  a.  genuine  manhood,  without  being  com- 
pelled to  go  on  to  speculate  on  subjects  as  to  which 
the  New  Testament  furnishes  no  data.  There  is  in 
theology  such  a  thing  as  a  wise  agnosticism  against 
which  the  traditional  Christology,  just  at  this  point, 
has  grievously  offended.  And  if  Kenotic  writers  have 
employed  language  which  appears  to  threaten  the  unity 
of  God,  and  brings  confusion  into  our  conceptions  of 
the  interior  life  of  deity,  the  defect  is  due  very  much 
to  their  sharing  the  erroneous  metaphysical  assumptions 
of  their  orthodox  opponents. 

The  service  which  the  Kenotic  Christology  renders 
has  been  well  summarised  by  Dr.  Forrest.  "  (1)  It 
represents  an  advance  on  the  Chalcedon  symbol,  in  that 
it  gives  a  truer  impression  of  the  New  Testament  facts 
and  teaching  as  to  the  Divine  sacrifice  involved  in  the 
Incarnation,  and  thus  emphasises  the  very  quality  that 
endues  the  Incarnation  with  its  power  of  moral  appeal. 
(2)  By  insisting  that  the  Divine  elements  in  Christ's 
character  are  not  metaphysical,  but  ethical  and  spiritual, 
it  reminds  us  that  the  deepest  qualities  in  God  and  man 
are  akin,  and  that  humanity  is  grounded  in  and  reproduces 
the  eternal  sonship  in  God."  ^  Like  all  other  theories, 
Kenoticism  must  be  allowed  the  full  benefit  of  the 
cardinal  distinction  in  logic  between  a  principle  and 
the  details  of  its  application.  It  will  not  do  to  reject 
as    mythology  ^    an    idea    which,   in    its    inmost    meaning , 

1  Christ  of  History,  203. 

*  Eitschl,  Justification  and  Reconciliation,  409-11, 


272  THE   PERSON   OF    JESUS    CHRIST 

is  inseparable  from  the  New  Testament  conception  of  our 
Lord — the  idea,  namely,  that  in  whatever  fashion  God  in 
Christ  brought  His  Divine  being  down  to  the  measures 
of  our  life,  and  became  poor  for  our  sake. 

§  5.  Christology  of  the  Mediating  School:  Dorner. — 
Beside  the  speculative  and  confessional  theologies  which 
flourished  in  the  nineteenth  century  stands  another 
group,  various  in  character  and  composition,  and  for 
that  reason  difficult  to  describe  by  any  less  vague  epithet 
than  "  mediating."  The  members  of  this  group  strove  to 
mediate,  first,  between  the  Lutheran  and  the  Keformed 
confessions,  in  the  interests  of  union ;  and  secondly, 
between  Church  doctrine  and  philosophy.  Kothe,  Ullmann, 
Julius  Miiller,  and  Dorner  are  some  of  the  most  dis- 
tinguished names.  We  select  Dorner  as  the  best  known 
and  probably  the  most  influential  thinker  of  the  party, 
and  present  those  features  of  his  Christological  work  which 
are  on  the  whole  most  interesting  and  distinctive.^ 

A  fundamental  presupposition  of  Dorner's  theory 
is  the  principle — equally  religious  and  speculative — 
that  God  and  man  are  not  mere  opposites,  but  are 
spiritually  of  kin.  Man  has  in  him  that  which  is 
infinite,  at  least  in  the  form  of  receptivity  for  the 
Divine ;  and  it  is  this  receptiveness  of  humanity  for  God, 
when  raised  to  its  highest,  absolute  power,  which  provides 
a  real  basis  for  the  existence  of  Jesus  as  "  the  adequate 
personal  organ  of  Deity."  We  may  even  say  that  since 
it  is  God's  nature  to  communicate  Himself  to  man, 
and  man  is  closely  allied  to  God,  the  idea  of  the  God- 
man,  in  whom  both  are  perfectly  united,  is  demanded 
antecedently  by  reason.  Not  only  so ;  the  organism  of 
humanity  craves  a  Head,  a  central  representative  In- 
dividual, infinitely  susceptible  of  God  ;  so  that  from 
yet  another  point  of  view  we  are  guided  to  the  thought 
that  religion  requires  for  its  consummation  and  absolute 
expression  not  the  idea  of  incarnation  merely,  but 
^  On  what  follows,  see  Kirn's  article  "  Dorner,"  RE.  iv.  802  ff. 


DORNER  273 

the  fact.  This  transcendental  necessity,  as  it  may  be 
called,  which  is  rendered  still  more  poignantly  urgent 
by  the  fact  of  sin,  is  finally  confirmed  and  sealed  to  us 
in  the  actualities  of  history.  The  real  Jesus  more  than 
fulfils  the  postulates  of  pure  thought.  Nor  is  it  sufficient 
to  explain  His  central  place  in  humanity  by  the  dynamic 
immanence  of  God  in  Him.  Xothiiig  less  than  a  personal 
self-communication  on  the  part  of  God  is  adequate  to  the 
human  need,  for  only  He  can  perfectly  reveal  God  who 
is  what  He  reveals. 

Dorner's  supreme  interest  in  the  unity  of  the  thean- 
thropic  Person  leads  him  to  argue  that  the  true  path  to 
the  elucidation  of  this  unity  is  to  start  not  from  either  of 
the  natures  separately  but  from  their  union  as  a  given  fact, 
as  a  spiritual  life-process  the  outcome  of  which,  owing  to 
the  inherent  organic  affinity  of  both,  is  the  creation  of  a 
specifically  Divine-human  consciousness.  The  Logos,  nnte- 
mundane  principle  in  God  of  revelation  and  self-bestowal, 
joins  Himself  to  human  nature,  not,  however,  in  its 
empirical  quality  of  sinfulness  and  defilement,  but  as  a 
new  humanity,  destined  to  be  the  Head  of  a  race  of  re- 
deemed men.  It  is  at  this  point  that  we  come  upon  the 
differential  feature  of  Dorner's  theory.  The  unity  of  the 
Divine-human  life  is  not  to  be  conceived  as  complete  from 
the  beginning.  "Since  Christ  exhibited  true  humanity 
in  an  actual  human  life,  a  truly  human  growth  pertains 
to  Him.  Since,  on  the  other  hand,  God  can  only  be 
perfectly  manifest  in  Christ  when  the  whole  fulness  of 
the  Divine  Logos  has  also  become  the  proper  fulness  of 
this  man  in  knowledge  and  volition,  and  therefore  has 
become  Divine-human,  with  the  growth  of  the  human  side 
there  is  also  necessarily  given  in  Him  a  growth  of  the 
God-humanity ;  and  the  incarnation  is  not  to  be  thought 
as  at  once  completed,  but  as  continuous,  nay  augmentative, 
seeing  that  God  as  Logos  ever  apprehends  and  appropriates 
such  new  aspects  as  are  generated  by  the  true  human 
development,  just  as,  conversely,  the  growing  actual  re- 
ceptiveness  of  the  humanity  combines  consciously  and 
i8 


274  THE    PERSON    OF    JESUS    CHRIST 

voluntarily  with  ever  new  aspects  of  the  Logos."  The 
anticipated  objection  that  this  view  yields  no  more  than 
a  human  Ego  in  ever-deepening  personal  fellowship  with 
God  is  met  by  the  statement  that  "  the  Logos  is  from  the 
beginning  united  with  Jesus  in  the  deepest  bases  of  being, 
and  the  life  of  Jesus  was  Divine-human  at  every  point, 
inasmuch  as  a  receptiveness  never  existed  for  the  Deity 
without  its  fulfilment."  ^ 

This  general  conception  is  already  present  in  Dorner's 
great  work  on  the  historical  development  of  Christology ;  ^ 
but  in  the  later  System  of  Cliristian  Doctrine  his  statement 
of    the  Trinitarian  presuppositions  is   modified  at  an  im- 
portant point.      He  insists  that  if  we  are  to  escape  the 
perils  of  tritheism  in  our  construction  of  the  Trinity,  and 
of  Nestorianism,  or  the  assumption  of  two  separate  person- 
alities, in  Christology,  a  distinction  must  be  drawn  between 
hypostasis  and  personality.       The  Logos,  he  declares,  "  is 
of    Himself  neither  a  person    in    the  same  sense  as    the 
absolute  Divine  personality,  nor  as  an  individual    man."  ^ 
And  what  He  does    is    not    so    much   to    constitute    the 
personality  of  the  incarnate  One  as  rather  to  supply  the 
basis    of    it,   in    His    character    as    the    eternal    principle 
within  the  Godhead  o'f  freedom,  movement,  and  revelation. 
I  should  single  out  two  points  in  regard  to  which  the 
foregoing  theory  has  proved  suggestive.      First,  it  lays  a 
needed    emphasis    upon    the    affinity  of    the    Divine    and 
human    natures,    which     earlier     thought    had    too    much 
tended  to  define  as  consisting  in  attributes  so  unlike  as  to 
be  wholly  disparate  and  incompatible.     There  was  a  real 
need  that  theology  should  recur  to  the  instinctive  assur- 
ance of  the  New  Testament  writers  that  between  God  and 
man  there  is  no  real  incongruity,  but  rather  an  essential 
kinship.      Secondly,  the  conception  of  an  incarnation  which 
is  gradual,  not  mechanically  and  unethically  complete  from 
the  beginning,  is  one  which  merits  the  closest  scrutiny,  and 
in    a   later  part  of   this  work  we   shall  have  occasion  to 

•  System  of  Cftristian  Doctrine,  vol.  iii.  328  (Eng.  tr.  slightly  modified). 
'  First  edition,  1839  ;  second,  1845.  *  Op.  cU.  vol.  iii.  293. 


BRITAIN    AND    AMERICA  275 

return  to  it.  Frequently  in  past  systems  the  person  of 
Christ  has  been  displayed  in  a  light  which  suggests  that 
its  initial  completeness  is  a  matter  of  principle,  but  the 
conviction  that  the  coalescence  of  the  Divine  and  human 
life  in  our  Lord  was  somehow  a  growing  and  advancing 
fact  is  one  from  which  it  is  difficult  to  escape  if  we 
look  closely  at  the  historic  data.  Of  course  it  is  another 
question  whether  Doruer's  theory,  based  as  it  is  on  certain 
metaphysical  assumptions  in  regard  to  the  "  natures,"  can 
be  defended  against  the  criticism  urged  amongst  others  by 
Kirn,  that  the  immanence  of  the  Logos,  which  according 
to  one  part  of  the  argument  is  the  basis  of  the  entire 
Divine-human  process,  is,  according  to  another  part,  no 
more  than  its  climax  and  consummation. 

§  6.  Christology  in  Britain  and  America. — Apart  from 
the  Unitarian  positions  defended  with  so  much  dignity 
and  impress! veuess  through  a  long  series  of  years  by  the 
late  Dr.  Martineau,  we  do  not  find  in  the  theology  of 
the  English-speaking  races  much  that  need  be  chronicled, 
whether  in  the  way  of  external  criticism  or  interior 
expansion  of  traditional  Church  doctrine.  A  series  of 
brief  allusions  must  suffice.  Coleridge  poured  a  stream 
of  fresh  life  into  English  divinity,  but  he  had  relatively 
little  to  say  regarding  the  theory  of  our  Lord's  person. 
On  the  whole  he  inclined  to  a  Platonising  view  of  the 
inherited  dogma,  loving  to  speak  of  Christ  as  the  Logos, 
or  Eedemptive  Eeason,  whom  he  describes  as  "  the 
living  and  self-subsisting  Word,  tlie  very  truth  of  all 
true  being,  and  the  very  being  of  all  enduring  truth ; 
the  reality,  which  is  the  substance  and  unity  of  all 
reality."  ^  The  Broad  Church  school,  which  served  itself 
heir  to  many  of  Coleridge's  best  ideas,  was  too  closely 
occupied  with  the  Christianising  of  social  life  to  have 
leisure  for  sustained  doctrinal  reflection  on  our  sub- 
ject. Erskine  of  Linlathen  scarcely  touched  Christology. 
McLeod  Campbell  did  much  by  his  noble  book  on  the 
'  Notes  on  the  Book  of  Common  Prayer  (published  1838-39). 


276  THE    PERSON    OF    JESUS    CHRIST 

atonement  to  promote  more  spiritual  conceptions  of  our 
Lord's  inner  life,  and  to  exhibit  the  vital  unity  of  incar- 
nation and  atonement  for  sin.^  Maurice,  like  Coleridge, 
showed  a  Platonic  tendency  to  speak  of  principles  or  ideas 
rather  than  of  persons  ;  and  it  would  probably  be  a  fair 
criticism  on  certain  expressions  in  his  works  to  say  that 
they  have  the  effect  of  depersonalising  Christ,  and  of 
representing  Him  almost  as  a  vague  spiritual  atmosphere 
or  element,  rather  than  as  an  historic  Figure  with  specific 
qualities  revealed  by  His  career  on  earth.  Thus  it  is  a 
favourite  line  of  reasoning  with  Maurice  that  every  man, 
simply  as  man,  is  joined  to  an  Almighty  Lord  of  life.  One 
nearer  to  him  than  his  own  flesh.  "  The  truth,"  he 
declares,  "  is  that  every  man  is  in  Christ  .  .  .  except  he 
were  joined  to  Christ  he  could  not  think,  breathe,  live 
a  single  hour."  Christ  the  essential  and  all-embracing 
ground  of  human  life  ;  every  man  in  Christ  whether  con- 
sciously or  not — these  may  be  called  the  root-principles 
of  the  theology  of  Maurice,  which  he  vainly  contends  are 
derived  from  the  express  teaching  of  the  apostles. 

We  may  recur  for  one  moment  to  the  controversy 
evoked  between  1828  and  1830  by  the  Christological  tenets 
of  Edward  Irving,  whose  life  was  one  of  the  greatest  and 
saddest  of  the  century.  He  was  charged  in  ecclesiastical 
courts  with  holding  "  the  sinfulness  of  Christ's  humanity  " ; 
but  the  expression  is  really  unjust,  and  no  reader  of 
the  history  of  the  case  will  deny  that  more  than  one 
argument  on  which  his  ecclesiastical  condemnation  rested 
was  gravely  docetic  in  its  implications.  Irving  clung 
with  his  whole  soul  to  Christ's  sympathy  with  the  tempted, 
His  veritable  brotherhood  with  man ;  and  to  secure  this 
he    felt   it   his  duty  to  affirm  that   the    Son    of    God   in 

'  Cf.  his  words  in  the  Introduction  to  The  Nature  of  the  Atonement : 
"  My  attempt  to  understand  and  illustrate  the  nature  of  the  atonement  has 
been  made  in  the  way  of  taking  the  subject  to  the  light  of  the  incarnation. 
Assuming  the  incarnation,  I  have  sought  to  realise  the  Divine  mind  in  Christ 
as  i^erfect  Sonship  tuwards  God  and  perfect  Brotherhood  towards  men,  and, 
doing  so,  the  incarnation  has  appeared  developing  itself  naturally  and 
necessarily  as  the  atonement "  (p.  xvii,  Sixth  Edition). 


EDWARD    IRVING  277 

incarnation  took  upon  Him  fallen  hiniian  nature,  with  the 
popsihilily  of  sin,  though,  by  the  indwelling  omnipotence 
of  the  Holy  Spirit,  sin  never  for  one  moment  touched  Him 
actually.  In  his  own  words :  "  The  point  at  issue  is 
simply  this,  whether  Christ's  flesh  had  the  grace  of  sin- 
lessness  and  incorruption  from  its  own  nature,  or  from 
the  indwelling  of  the  Holy  Ghost ;  I  say  the  latter." 
Elsewhere  he  inveighs  against  two  main  errors :  the  be- 
lief that  Christ's  nature  was  intrinsically  better  than  ours, 
or  that  it  underwent  a  physical  change  before  its  assump- 
tion into  the  person  of  the  Son.  "  It  was  manhood  fallen 
which  He  took  up  into  His  Divine  person,  in  order  to 
prove  the  grace  and  the  might  of  Godhead  in  redeeming 
it."  So  the  humanity  was  without  guilt,  but  with  every- 
thing else  that  belongs  to  man,  and  was  "  held  like  a 
fortress  in  immaculate  purity  by  the  Godhead  within." 
"  Christ  was  holy  in  spite  of  the  law  of  the  flesh  working 
in  Him  as  in  another  man  ;  but  never  in  Him  prevailing."  ^ 
And  on  these  premises  Irving  built  up  a  theory  of  salva- 
tion according  to  which  our  Lord,  thus  maintaining  His 
personal  siulessness,  and  enduring  to  the  uttermost  the 
penalty  due  to  His  sinful  human  nature,  achieved  the 
reconciliation  of  God  and  man  in  His  own  person, 
the  thing  done  in  one  portion  being  done,  virtually,  in 
the  whole. 

Of  this  eccentric  though  touching  view  it  may  be 
said,  briefly,  that  the  oneness  of  our  Lord  with  us  in  the 
moral  conflict,  which  was  for  Irving  the  heart  of  all 
things,  is  indeed  a  great  fact ;  yet  a  theory  of  it  is  not 
to  be  purchased  at  the  price  of  asserting  that  His  humanity 

^  Irving  was  not  quite  original  in  this  view.  Cf.  Ullniann,  Die  Siind- 
losigkeit  Jesu  (7te  Auflage),  101  ;  and  Bruce,  op.  cit.  250,  who  points  out 
tliat  the  same  theory  was  simultaneously  advanced  by  Gottfried  Menken, 
of  Bremen.  A  writer  in  the  Uncyclojiaedia  Britannica  (9th  edition),  vol. 
xiii.  372,  says  curiously  that  Irving  was  condemned  "  for  publishing 
doctrines  regarding  the  humanity  of  Jesus  Christ  now  generally  held  by 
the  broad  school  of  theologians."  This  statement,  if  read  at  all  strictly,  is 
absurd.  No  modern  thinker  with  whom  I  am  acquainted  could  be  said  to 
hold  Irving's  position. 


278  THE    PERSON    OF   JESUS    CHRIST 

was  corrupt,  with  a  corruptness  which  only  the  Holy 
Spirit  could  hold  in  check.  Misled  probably  by  the 
patristic  habit  of  using  "  flesh "  as  a  synonym  of  "  man- 
hood," Irving  confused  the  idea  of  "  corrupt "  with  that 
of  "  corruptible "  (in  the  sense  of  liable  to  corruption  or 
decay),  and  hence  from  the  fact  that  Christ  was  liable 
to  decay  and  death,  as  being  capable  of  dying,  deduced 
the  rash  conclusion  that  His  humanity  was  fallen. 
Certainly  he  held  strongly  that  only  a  fallen  nature 
could  be  tempted,  and  that  to  deny  this  is  to  deny 
Christ's  manhood.  There  can  be  no  doubt  that  Irving 
passionately  repudiated  the  idea  of  Christ  having  actually 
sinned ;  but  it  is  after  all  only  a  loose  idea  of  sinlessness 
which  takes  it  as  compatible  with  the  existence  in  Christ 
of  a  potential  fault  and  strong  efficacious  germ  of  evil, 
divergent  even  as  undeveloped  from  the  Divine  standard 
of  perfect  righteousness ;  which  is  the  connotation  of 
"  fallen  human  nature "  and  "  original  sin "  in  all  other 
cases. 

The  influence  of  the  eminent  American  divine,  Horace 
Bushnell  (1802—1876),  is  in  many  ways  comparable  to 
that  of  Eitschl.  On  the  whole  he  deprecated  unprofitable 
curiosity,  peering  into  impracticable  questions.  "  Christ  is 
not  given,"  he  writes,  "  that  we  may  set  ourselves  to  reason 
out  His  mystery,  but  simply  that  God  may  thus  express 
His  own  feeling  and  draw  Himself  into  union  with  us, 
by  an  act  of  accommodation  to  our  sympathies  and 
capacities."  The  deity  of  Christ,  he  repeats  again  and 
again,  is  in,  not  outside  or  apart  from,  what  He  does  in 
bringing  us  to  God,  but  we  must  be  content  with  ignor- 
ance as  to  the  nature  of  God's  indwelling  in  Him.  Not 
in  metaphysical  but  in  ethical  conceptions  can  we  best 
set  forth  the  highest  truth  about  His  person. 

§  7.  Ritschl  and  the  Rifschlians. — ^The  work  begun  by 
Schleiermacher  was  taken  up  fifty  years  later  by  Albrecht 
Eitschl  (1822-1889),  who  strove  even  more  persistently 
to  vindicate  for  the  historic  Christ    the  central  place  in 


ALBRECHT    RITSCHL  279 

His  religion.  Eitschl,  we  can  see,  had  a  deeper  sense  of 
history  than  his  predecessor,  whose  view  of  redemption, 
he  considered,  represented  it  too  much  as  acting  on  men 
like  a  natural  intluence  rather  than  as  mediated  by  those 
ethical  and  spiritual  motives  which  alone  are  operative 
in  Christianity.  Also  he  laid  stress  on  the  supreme 
blessing  of  the  Gospel  as  consisting  in  personal  fellowship 
with  God,  which  is  brought  to  the  individual  by  the 
influences  of  the  Christian  society,  is  based  on  the 
forgiveness  of  sins,  and  sent  home  to  heart  and  conscience 
by  the  sight  of  God's  love  revealed  in  Jesus.  If  we 
know  God  as  Father,  it  is  because  we  know  Him  through 
the  Son. 

Eitschl  would  not  have  claimed  to  teach  any  Chris- 
tology  in  the  older  sense  of  the  word.  Many  traditional 
problems,  he  held,  such  as  that  of  the  two  natures 
and  the  Trinitarian  relation  of  the  Son  to  the  Father, 
have  no  bearing  on  experience  and  lie  outside  the  range 
of  theology.  Like  every  other  doctrine,  our  view  of 
Christ  must  be  stated  in  judgments  of  value  or  apprecia- 
tion (Werthur telle),  which  affirm  His  significance  for  the 
soul ;  or,  to  put  it  otherwise,  we  see  the  Divine  quality 
of  Christ's  person  in  the  Divine  character  of  His  work. 
The  impression  He  makes  is  most  fitly  expressed  by 
saying  that  He  has  for  us  the  religious  'value  of  God. 
He  redeemed  men  by  fulfilling  perfectly  the  vocation  given 
Him  to  establish  the  Kingdom  of  God,  and  patiently 
enduring  all  things  even  to  death :  and  on  the  basis  of 
this  achievement  the  society  gathered  round  Him  is  for- 
given, has  imputed  to  it  the  position  or  relationship  towards 
God,  which  Jesus  held  for  Himself  inviolably  to  the  end, 
and  is  raised  "  above  the  iron  law  of  necessity  "  into  the 
freedom  and  joy  of  God's  family.  Since  the  functions 
of  Jesus — uniting  in  Himself,  as  He  does,  absolute  revela- 
tion and  ideal  humanity — are  thus  Divine,  He  is  Himself 
Divine  in  character.  \i  He  inaugurated  a  new  relation 
between  God  and  man,  realised  it  in  His  own  life,  and  now 
produces  it  in  all  believers,  then  to  call  Him  Divine  is,  in 


280  THE    PERSON    OF    JESUS    CHRIST 

Herrmann's  striking  phrase,  "  only  to  give  Him  His  right 
name."  But  it  is  useless  to  try  and  explain  the  signifi- 
cance of  Jesus;  instead  of  being  explicable  by  other 
things,  He  explains  everything  else.  He  is  known  by  faith 
in  a  unique  and  unapproachable  relation  to  His  people ; 
to  go  behind  this,  and  interpret  it  by  ideas  like  the 
Absolute  or  the  Logos,  is  to  define  the  clear  in  terms  of 
the  obscure.  No  confession  of  His  Godhead  has  any  value 
save  as  generated  by  experience  of  His  grace. 

Every  one  must  feel  the  truth  of  much  of  this. 
Christ's  person  seen  in  the  light  of  His  work  is  a  prin- 
ciple fixed  once  for  all  by  Luther  and  Schleiermacher. 
But  one  may  reasonably  doubt  whether  Eitschl  does 
actually  let  this  fundamental  axiom  cairy  him  all  the 
way.  The  argument  is  that  Christ  is  Divine  just  because 
His  gifts — pardon,  liberty,  life — are  so ;  but  does  Eitschl 
after  all  push  home  the  inference  ?  That  he  assigns  to 
Christ  an  absolute  uniqueness  for  religion  is  unquestion- 
able ;  but  passages  also  occur  in  which  he  declares 
plainly  that  the  Godhead  of  Christ  must  be  capable 
of  imitation  by  His  people,  and  protests  that  the  dogma 
of  His  pre-existence  confers  on  Him  a  solitary  great- 
ness in  which  the  believer  can  have  no  share.  There 
can  be  no  doubt  at  all  that  in  defining  the  content  of 
Christ's  deity  he  omits  altogether  the  idea  both  of  pre- 
existence  and  of  exaltation.  We  have  no  concern,  he 
argues,  with  the  pre-existent  One,  who  exists  for  God 
only ;  our  faith  is  asked  for  the  historic  life  that  began 
at  Bethlehem.  In  the  same  way  nothing  can  be  known 
about  the  exalted  Lord  save  from  His  recorded  history. 
It  is  easy  to  see  that  this  exclusive  insistence  on  a  past 
which  is  growing  ever  more  remote  tends  to  the  repre- 
sentation of  Christ,  semi-deistically,  as  absent  and  far 
away,  rather  than  as  ever-present  in  the  sovereign  power 
of  His  resurrection.  And  as  regards  the  conception  of 
pre-existence,  Eitschl  steadily  declined  to  acknowledge 
its  religious  meaning  and  importance.  No  one  could 
possibly  wish  to    censure    a    mere    refusal  to  embark  on 


MODERN    RADICALISM  281 

empty  speculation  in  this  region,  or  to  forsake  the  indica- 
tions of  concrete  believing  experience  ;  but  it  is  another 
thing  when  theology,  at  the  instance  of  a  mistaken 
philosopliical  positivism,  grows  blind  to  the  infinite  self- 
surrender  of  God  in  becoming  man  for  our  redemption. 

In  the  further  progress  of  the  Eitschlian  movement, 
as  might  be  expected,  many  varieties  of  opinion  came 
gradually  to  light.  Thus  it  was  debated  whether  on  the 
principles  of  the  master  it  is  permissible  to  speak  of 
the  Godhead  of  Christ ;  and  sides  were  taken  on  the 
question,  though  to  some  extent  parties  differed  only  about 
a  word.  Some  discussion  has  also  taken  place  regard- 
ing the  precise  elements  in  the  New  Testament  picture 
of  Jesus  to  which  faith  i.s  directed.  Is  the  resurrec- 
tion, for  example,  part  of  the  ground  of  faith,  a  vital 
factor  in  the  message  that  evokes  faith ;  or  is  it  not 
rather  the  object  of  a  conviction  in  which  faith  is  already 
presupposed  ?  Along  with  this  there  has  gone  a  general 
consent  that  while  faith  rests  upon  the  historic  person- 
ality of  Jesus,  as  revealed  in  His  actual  words  and  deeds, 
this  must  not  be  construed  into  a  statutory  dependence 
on  particulars  of  the  Gospel  story. 

§  8.  The  Modern  Badical  School. — A  few  concluding 
words  may  be  said  respecting  the  positions  maintained, 
with  so  much  vivacity,  by  members  of  the  radical  party 
which  has  sprung  into  prominence  in  the  last  ten  years, 
and  which,  speaking  broadly,  represents  the  extreme 
left  wing  of  Kitschlianism.  They  form  the  so-called 
religionsgeschichtliche  Schule,  and  their  aim  is  without  fear 
or  favour  to  determine  the  place  of  Christianity  in  the 
religious  history  of  the  world.  Of  this  school  Dr.  Sanday 
has  said  with  justice  that  "  the  writers  cut  themselves 
adrift  from  the  universal  verdict  of  the  Church  and  from 
traditional  Christianity.  They  make  no  attack  upon  the 
Creeds,  but  they  deliberately  ignore  them,  and  in  one  or 
two  places  where  this  important  question  would  naturally 
come  up,  they  in  set  terms  deny  what  the  Creeds  affirm. 


282  THE    PERSON    OF   JESUS    CHRIST 

As  a  rule,  the  central  doctrine  of  all  is  not  so  much 
contested  as  quietly  put  aside.  The  constructive  view 
of  primitive  Christianity  is  built  up  without  it."  ^  The 
following  is  a  characteristic  statement  by  Wernle.  "  We 
know,"  he  writes,  "  that  above  the  general  level  of  man- 
kind rise  the  prophets  and  mediators,  men  who  stand  in 
an  especially  close  relation  to  God  and  have  an  especial 
sense  of  being  called  by  Him,  whose  souls  are  full  of  the 
mysterious  and  wonderful,  who  breathe  the  air  of  eternity 
and  behold  visions  of  the  world  that  lies  beyond  this  outer 
world  of  phenomena.  Amongst  them  we  see  Jesus.  That 
which  distinguishes  Him  and  places  Him  apart  from  the 
others  cannot  perhaps  be  expressed  theoretically  at  all, 
but  we  can  express  it  practically  by  entering  into  His 
service  and  by  doing  God's  will  as  He  bids  us  do  it.  So 
...  we  testify  to  men,  in  Jesus'  own  way,  that  He  is  our 
Master  and  that  He  has  made  us  at  one  with  God.  He 
who  will  may  call  this  a  practical  Christology.  The 
dogmatical,  certainly,  lies  behind  us."^  These  sincere  and 
moving  words  suggest  one  or  two  observations. 

First,  the  category  under  which  Jesus  is  subsumed 
is  that  of  hero  or  religious  genius.  It  is  a  con- 
ception introduced  into  theology  by  Strauss,  and  largely 
accentuated  by  Thomas  Carlyle ;  and  by  these  writers  it 
is  explicitly  held  to  embrace  more  than  Jesus.  They 
tell  us  that  in  the  primitive  age  adoring  believers  inevit- 
ably came  to  deck  Jesus  with  all  conceivable  names  of 
honour,  and  to  declare  in  retrospect  that  He  was  God's 
unique  gift  to  man,  a  creative  vehicle  of  revelation,  a 
point  at  which  heaven  touched  sinful  earth.  But  this 
is  poetry,  out  of  which  theology  has  made  prose.  In 
sober  truth,  Jesus  is  not  the  object  of  faith ;  like  us, 
rather.  He  has  faith,  and  we  come  to  share  it. 

Again,  these  writers  are  well  aware  that  their  views 
run  directly  counter  to  the  apostolic  doctrine.  Formerly 
it  was  customary  for  those  who  rejected  the   traditional 

^  Outlines  of  the  Life  of  Christ,  263. 

^  Quoted  in  the  Review  of  Theology  and  Fhilosophy,  i.  278. 


MODERN    RADICALISM  283 

Christology  to  appeal  to  the  New  Testament,  but  this  is 
now  given  up.  It  is  perceived  that  in  most  important 
respects  the  Church  has  the  New  Testament  on  its  side  ;  not 
of  course  for  each  detail,  or  for  the  intellectual  categories 
employed  in  after  days,  but  iu  essence.  Accordingly 
men  like  Wernle  and  Bousset  now  repudiate  the  apostolic 
view  of  Christ  quite  as  sharply  as  that  of  the  fourth 
century.  St.  Paul,  St.  John,  and  the  writer  to  the 
Hebrews  are  equally  wrong  with  Origen  and  Athanasius — 
not  so  far  astray,  perhaps,  but  as  really.  Christology  has 
been  a  blunder  from  the  first.  It  is  worth  while  to  note 
the  fact  that  the  apostolic  convictions  about  Clirist  are 
admitted  to  have  been  the  very  centre  of  their  message. 
Nor  is  it  denied  that  our  religion  has  never  assumed  a 
form  in  which  it  did  not  rest  mainly  on  a  Christological 
basis.  But  the  writers  I  have  in  mind  would  say  that 
all  this  is  owing  to  an  unfortunate  misconception,  which 
would  very  likely  have  been  avoided  if  men  had  left 
dogmas  alone  and  kept  close  to  facts.  And  for  the 
modern  intelligence,  it  is  held,  nothing  can  be  made  of 
the  person  of  our  Lord  till  we  distinguish  clearly  between 
the  historic  Man  of  Nazareth  and  the  dogmatic  Christ 
of  the  apostles.  Jesus'  place  in  the  doctrinal  system  is 
not  at  the  centre,  but  among  the  "  means  of  grace."  In  a 
cerLain  loose  sense  it  may  be  fitting  to  say  that  we  find 
God  "  in  "  Jesus,  but  the  time  has  gone  past  for  speaking 
as  if  God  had  received  us  "  for  Christ's  sake,"  or  for 
bowing  to  the  absolute  claim :  "  No  man  cometh  unto  the 
Father  but  by  Me," 

Finally,  these  writers  profess  to  be  able  to  show  how 
the  primitive  but  mistaken  view  of  Jesus  came  to  exist. 
Virtually  every  ingredient  in  the  New  Testament  con- 
ception of  our  Lord  can  be  traced  to  its  proximate  origin 
in  the  ideas  of  some  other  faith.  A  vague  Messianic 
ideal  was  then  current  in  the  world ;  a  kind  of  re- 
demption-myth circulated  in  a  thousand  pious  minds  over 
the  Eoman  Empire  in  myriad  forms,  and  these  yearning 
dreams  of  eternal  life,  in  all  their  pathetic  intangibility, 


284  THE    PERSON    OF    JESUS    CHRIST 

were  in  due  time  deposited  on  the  idealised  name  of 
Jesus.^  It  was  felt  that  all  things  expected  of  the 
coming  Saviour  had  been  fulfilled  in  Him.  The  ferment- 
ing thought  of  the  time  supplied  a  fruitful  soil  for  an 
imaginative  and  mythological  growth  of  doctrine,  which 
can  be  traced,  nearly  without  remainder,  either  to  oriental 
Gnosticism  or  to  Judaism  of  the  syncretistic  type. 

This  modern  form  of  what  may  fairly  be  called 
the  Higher  Unitarianism  will  occupy  us  repeatedly  in 
this  book ;  and  at  present  I  will  only  pause  to  offer 
one  criticism.  It  is  that  little  has  yet  been  done  by 
writers  of  this  party,  save  by  vague  allusions  to  the 
mystery  of  personality,  to  shew  why  Jesus  drew  to 
Himself  these  wonderful  epithets  of  religious  trust  and 
adoration.  Why  should  this  Man  be  chosen  to  have 
such  things  said  of  Him  as  that  in  Him  all  things  consist, 
that  in  Him  dwells  all  the  fulness  of  the  Godhead  bodily, 
unless  He  had  indeed  made  such  an  impression  on  the 
apostles  that  no  lower  terms  would  serve  ?  It  is  surely  a 
question  of  sufficient  gravity  how  we  are  to  account  for 
the  worship  given  to  Him,  then  or  now,  except  on  the 
supposition  that  His  nature  was  such  as  rightly  to  evoke 
and  to  retain  it.  To  suppose  the  contrary  is  at  variance 
with  the  one  certainty  on  which  faith  builds,  which  all 
testimony  supports,  and  which  serious  Christian  reflection 
instinctively  assumes — the  certainty  that  Jesus  drew  a 
clear  distinction  between  Himself  and  all  the  children 
of  men,  and  that  alike  in  His  own  mind  and  that  of  the 
Church  universal  He  is  not  one  of  a  class,  or  even  first 
among  His  compeers,  but  in  a  solitary  and  unshared  sense 
the  Lord  and  Redeemer  of  the  world. 

1  If  this  be  so,  how  comes  it  that  no  trace  exists  in  Judaism  of  the  myth 
of  a  dying  and  rising  Saviour  ?    Of.  suijra,  p.  75. 


BOOK  TIT. 

THE  RECONSTRUCTIVE  STATEMENT 
OF  THE  DOCTRINE. 

PART  I. 

PRELIMINARY  QUESTIONS. 
CHAPTER  I. 

THE  INTELLECTUAL  NEED  FOR  A  CHRISTOLOGY. 

The  Christian  religion  is  acknowledged  to  consist  in  or 
involve  a  certain  spiritual  attitude  to  the  person  of  Jesus 
Christ.  Historically  it  is  in  this  way  that  Christianity 
has  defined  itself,  both  in  experience  and  in  theory ;  from 
the  first  it  has  been  a  spiritual  movement  in  which  He 
is  assigned  the  central  place  and  becomes  the  object  of 
explicit  faith.  No  branch  of  the  Church  has  enjoyed  a 
strong  or  contagious  life  which  has  ceased  to  look  to  Jesus 
with  adoring  trust  and  to  find  in  Him  the  abidiug  way  to 
the  Father.  x4.nd  the  proposal  to  reconstruct  Christianity 
by  displacing  Jesus  from  this  position  is  one  which  leaves 
the  firm  ground  of  fact  by  surrendering  continuity  with 
the   past    and    adopting    the    visionary   programme    of    a 

Literature — Dorner,  System  of  Christian  Doctrine,  1890 ;  Kaftan, 
Ztir  Dogmatik,  1904  ;  Garvie,  Studies  in  the  Inner  Life  of  Jesiis,  1907  ; 
Caird,  Fundamental  Ideas  of  Christianity,  1899  ;  Simpson,  Fact  of  Christ, 
1900  ;  Kahler,  Wifscnschaft  der  chrisllichen  Lehre^,  1905  ;  Forsyth,  Person 
and  Place  of  Jesus  Christ,  1909  ;  Frank,  System  der  christUchen  Wahrheit^, 
1894. 

285 


286  THE    PERSON   OF   JESUS    CHRIST 

religious  life  worthy  to  retain  the  rights  of  the  Christian 
name  while  yet  renouncing  the  fundamental  Christian 
conviction. 

In  a  later  chapter  we  shall  inquire  in  more  detail 
what  is  meant  by  the  statement  that  Christ  is,  in  the 
proper  sense  of  the  word,  the  ohject  of  religious  faith.  At 
present  we  assume  the  fact.  And  from  it  we  derive  the 
immediate  inference  that  for  reasoning  men  it  is  impossible 
to  refrain  from  a  theoretical  interpretation  of  this  Person 
in  whom  they  believe.  If  we  put  faith  in  Jesus,  and 
if,  as  Luther  used  to  say,  faith  and  God  belong  together, 
we  must  seek  an  explanation  of  One  who  so  far  at  least 
occupies  a  position  in  the  Christian  consciousness  on  that 
side  of  reality  which  we  call  Divine  ;  ^  we  must  ask  whether 
He  has  the  reality  as  well  as  the  religious  value  of  God. 
The  apostles,  who  had  been  prepared  for  the  Gospel  by 
the  profoundest  religion  of  antiquity,  felt  that  the  concep- 
tion of  God  had  been  radically  modified  by  their  experience 
of  Jesus ;  and  those  who  share  that  experience,  in  its 
regenerating  power,  must  like  them  be  conscious  of  an 
irrepressible  impulse  to  search  out  and  construe  to  intelli- 
gence the  implicates  of  Christ's  redeeming  influence,  and 
in  particular  of  His  personal  relationship  to  the  Father. 
Not  merely,  that  is,  ought  Dogmatic  to  include  a  Chris- 
tology  as  one  of  its  integral  constituents,  but  the  task 
of  Christology  is  prescribed  ab  initio  by  the  specifically 
Christian  experience.  Silence  on  the  matter  is  an  avowal 
that  we  feel  no  need  of  Christ  as  mediating  our  personal 
possession  of  God.  Kaftan  puts  the  truth  not  a  whit 
too  strongly  when  he  asserts  that  Christology  is  either 
the  doctrine  of  Christ's  Godhead,  or  it  is  nothing  at  all.^ 
The  one  real  question  before  us  is  how  the  man  Jesus 
is  God  for  the  believing  mind,  but  this  question  we  may 
not  shirk. 

To  this  contention  that  the  modern  theologian  has 
no  choice  but  to  "  christologise  "  there  are,  however,  two 

1  Cf.  Denney,  Jesus  and  the  Gospel.  ^  ZTK.  (1904),  181. 


JESUS    AS    RELIGIOUS    GENIUS  287 

possible  objections,  both  widely  current  and  each 
diametrically  antagonistic  to  the  other.  On  the  one  hand 
it  is  said :  Christology  cannot  be  essential,  since  it  is  in 
fact  superfluous ;  on  the  other  hand  it  is  said,  with  equal 
emphasis :  Christology  is  no  longer  essential,  since  the 
work  was  all  done  long  ago. 

Christology  is  held  to  be  superfluous  by  all  those 
modern  writers  to  whom  it  comes  naturally  to  describe 
Jesus  by  the  category  of  genius  or  hero.  For  this  mode 
of  thought,  at  bottom  a  significant  reaction  against 
aSTaturalism,  Jesus  is  the  sublimest  of  great  men.  He  is 
the  man  in  whom  faith  in  God,  virtue,  and  immortality 
is  seen  in  unsurpassed  and  victorious  power;  He  is  the 
most  inspired  of  the  prophets  of  God's  love.  But  in  the 
last  resort  He  takes  His  place  beside  us  over-against  God, 
content  to  struggle  and  pray  like  His  human  brethren. 
We  are  summoned,  therefore,  not  to  put  faith  in  Him,  but 
to  share  the  faith  He  had.  It  is  merely  a  venial  exaggera- 
tion to  call  Him  the  one  Mediator  between  God  and  man. 
A  new  and  superior  revelation  may  yet  be  given. 

It  is  unnecessary  to  say  that  on  such  terms  theology 
cannot  long  retain  a  serious  doctrine  of  Christ's  person. 
Something  might  still  be  said  regarding  Him,  doubtless, 
under  the  rubric  of  "  the  means  of  grace  " ;  but  in  no  sense 
could  we  be  said  to  believe  in  God  through  Him  in  such 
wise  that  He  forms  an  integral  and  organic  part  of  that  in 
which  we  believe.  His  relation  to  the  new  life  of  grace 
and  freedom  is  at  best  fortuitous.  He  was  the  first 
Christian ;  into  that  phrase  we  may  put  what  depths  of 
meaning  we  choose,  but  to  transcend  it  is  forbidden.  All 
Christology  based  on  the  hypothesis  that  He  was  more 
is  only  dead  matter  too  long  harboured  within  the  system 
of  religious  trutli. 

The  question  whether  this  is  a  position  compatible 
with  Christianity  may  be  answered  in  two  ways.  It  may  be 
answered  alike  by  reference  to  history  and  by  an  examina- 
tion of  ideas.  As  concerns  history,  it  will  not  be  denied 
that  from  its  most    primitive  origins  the  Church  adored 


288  THE    PERSON    OF   JESUS    CHRIST 

Jesus  Christ  and  set  Him  in  the  highest  place.  For  the 
apostles  Christ  filled  the  whole  sphere  of  God,  and  the 
settlement  of  fundamental  issues  between  Divine  holiness 
and  human  sin  rested  on  what  He  was  and  had  accom- 
plished. Not  less  for  us  to-day  faith  in  God  means 
faith  in  Jesus.  In  this  naive  and  experimental  sense,  it 
is  not  too  much  to  say  that  the  Godhead  of  Jesus  is  de 
fide  for  the  Christian  mind.  Thus  only  can  the  vital 
continuity  of  the  Christian  religion  be  preserved.  It  is 
an  open  question,  of  course,  whether  the  terms  anciently 
employed  to  define  Jesus'  unique  transcendence  will  not 
bear  amendment ;  but  the  spiritual  attitude  they  witness  to 
is  the  essence  of  religion  as  we  have  learnt  it  from  Christ 
Himself.  To  alter  this  is  to  alter  the  religion ;  and  why 
in  that  case  the  old  name  should  be  retained  is  something 
of  a  mystery.  Once  abandon  the  New  Testament  convic- 
tion of  Jesus'  relation  to  men,  and  theirs  to  Him,  and 
while  doubtless  for  a  time  it  may  be  difficult  to  restrain 
our  hearts  from  going  out  to  Him  as  of  old  in  adoring 
worship,  the  lapse  of  time  may  be  trusted  to  do  its  fatal 
work.  We  shall  cease  to  trust  Him;  for  One  who  is 
simply  human  to  the  mind  cannot  remain  adorable  to  the 
conscience  and  the  heart. 

Turning  now  to  the  proposed  new  category,  let  us 
note  how  impossible  it  is  to  accept  hero  or  genius  as  a 
satisfying  designation  of  Jesus  Christ.  For  one  thing,  it 
has  no  relation  to  the  singular  self- consciousness  mirrored 
in  the  Gospels.  If  language  has  a  meaning,  this  is  a 
framework  into  which  Jesus'  thought  of  Himself,  as  the 
unique  Son  of  the  Father  and  therefore  the  unique 
Deliverer  of  man,  simply  cannot  be  compressed.  If  we 
call  Him  hero,  it  is  only  because  at  the  same  time  He 
reveals  Himself  as  infinitely  more.  And  that  no  man  can 
be  more  is  an  unprovable  a  priori  dogma,  resulting  from 
a  violent  application  of  the  abstract  principle  of  Uniformity. 
Along  with  this,  however,  we  can  see  that  the  ethical 
quality  or  constitution  indicated  by  the  two  suggested 
words  is  inapposite  to  the  case.      The  powers  of  a  genius, 


JESUS    AS    RELIGIOUS    GENIUS  289 

and  their  active  exertion,  have  reference  properly  to  his 
own  self-centred  will.  His  supreme  aim  is  to  realise 
himself,  to  express  his  nature  perfectly,  to  develop  and 
unfold  the  abnormal  powers  pent  up  within  him.  He 
has  no  sense  of  an  entrusted  mission  ;  men  are  there  for 
him  to  use  in  the  process  of  his  self- manifestation,  and 
whether  the  outcome  will  be  to  bless  or  curse  them  is 
a  question  of  relatively  slight  importance.  Jesus,  on  the 
other  hand,  is  the  Christ.  He  is  come  not  to  do  His  own 
will  but  the  will  of  God  who  sent  Him.  Not  to  develop 
or  glorify  His  own  nature  is  His  first  care,  but  to  serve  ; 
to  serve  the  Father,  primarily,  but  a  Father  who  is  best 
served  by  the  redemptorial  service  of  man.  In  other 
words,  there  is  nothing  in  Christ's  aim  or  personality 
which  is  not  religious ;  genius  need  not  have  any  religious 
quality  whatever.  A  second  consideration  is  that  genius 
is  after  all  only  a  question  of  degree.  It  transcends  the 
ordinary  bulk  of  mankind  to  an  extent  which  can  ap- 
proximately be  measured,  and'  there  is  a  class  or  group  of 
men  to  all  of  whom  the  title  can  be  applied  with  tolerably 
equal  justice.  But  the  Christ  is  solitary.  Hero-worship 
therefore — and  hero  is  simply  genius  in  the  sphere  of  will 
• — must  always  be  separated  by  an  impassable  gulf  from 
the  believing  worship  of  Christ.  To  adore  a  hero  is,  in 
the  subtlest  way,  to  adore  humanity  and  therewith  our- 
selves as  part  of  conceivably  heroic  mankind ;  but  when 
we  worship  Jesus  the  Christ  we  implicitly  worship  God 
in  Him.  I  do  not  deny  that  an  attitude  towards  Jesus 
is  possible — an  attitude  of  romantic  or  aesthetic  admira- 
tion in  which  conscience  has  no  part — which  is  not  felt 
as  altering  or  indeed  touching  our  relation  to  God ;  but 
whatever  be  the  proper  name  for  this  attitude  of  mind, 
it  has  at  all  events  no  connection  with  religion.  It 
centres  after  all  in  the  human  Ego,  not,  as  religion  must, 
in  God. 

One  point  more  may  be  noticed.      In  the  presence  of 
a  genius  we  are  acutely  and  disablingly  conscious  of  our 
distance  from  him,  of  his  cold  and  remote  transcendence 
^9 


290  THE    PERSON    OF    JESUS    CHRIST 

of  other  men ;  and  it  is  therefore  in  no  way  surprising 
that  with  enthusiasm  for  genius  there  should  often  be 
combined,  in  the  devotee's  mind,  a  pessimistic  contempt 
for  mankind  as  a  whole.  Admiration  of  the  superman 
is  made  a  refuge  from  disgust  at  the  common  crowd. 
His  wealth  of  being  is  some  meagre  consolation  for  the 
universal  poverty.  But  these  are  feelings  which  cannot 
breathe  in  Jesus'  presence.  His  sublimity  does  not  put 
us  far  from  Him ;  instead,  it  gives  us  courage  to  draw 
near  and  receive  out  of  His  fulness.  He  is  nearer  to  us, 
more  by  far  our  fellow  and  our  kinsman,  than  the  greatest 
names  in  human  story ;  and  in  this  connection  it  is  note- 
worthy that  His  overwhelming  influence  on  the  disciples 
never  had  the  effect  of  obscuring  their  instinctive  sense 
of  His  real  manhood.  But  if  we  are  personally  conscious 
of  His  subduing  power,  we  know  by  the  same  experience 
that  His  gifts  are  for  others  also.  One  who  loved  us,  in 
our  unworthiness,  could  not  despise  any.  He  could  not 
regard  men  as  things  to  be  handled,  and  utilised,  and  cast 
away.  He  could  not  transgress  the  high  ethical  law  which 
enjoins  that  persons  must  always  be  treated  as  ends,  never 
as  merely  means.^ 

Whatever  then  be  the  scope  or  value  of  the  category 
"  hero,"  it  is  useless  for  the  purpose  of  formulating  the 
Christian  view  of  Christ.  To  guide  ourselves  by  it  is  to 
make  an  initial  irretrievable  mistake.  Now  as  in  the 
beginning  faith  consists  in  taking  to  Jesus  the  attitude 
which  He  Himself  invited.  Now  as  in  the  beginning  the 
name  of  God  has  the  final  meaning  Jesus  gave  it,  and  part 
of  that  meaning  is  Himself.  But  if  Jesus  is  a  hero  and 
no  more,  even  if  the  greatest  of  all  heroes,  Christology  is 
but  a  waste  of  labour.  We  need  not  strive  to  bring  out 
the  implications  of  His  supreme  religious  value  if  that 
value  is  in  the  end  merely  relative. 

A  recent  writer  has  observed  that  "  the  idea  that  for 
a   new   object   we   might   have   to   create   a   new    concept, 

1  Cf.  with  the  foregoing  two  admirable  pages  in  Schlatter's  Das  chrisUiche 
Dogma,  305-6. 


THE    CATEGORY    OF    HERO  291 

perhaps  a  new  method  of  thinking,  is  deeply  repugnant 
to  us."  ^  He  is  speaking  of  philosophy,  but  it  is  not 
in  philosophy  alone  that  this  form  of  intellectual  inertia 
has  been  exhibited.  It  has  been  conspicuously  manifest 
in  the  interpretation  of  Jesus.  Entia  non  sunt  multipli- 
canda  praeter  necessitatem  is  a  good  rule,  but  it  may 
result  in  spurious  simplification,  and  thus  hide  from 
us  the  impossibility  of  getting  the  facts  into  the  ready- 
made  frames  of  our  old  concepts,  or  fitting  the  new 
reality  with  some  one  of  the  familiar  time-honoured  cate- 
gories. This  comes  of  the  wilful  assumption  that  one  of 
the  old  concepts,  already  known,  must  suit ;  that  there  can 
after  all  be  no  surprises  for  the  mind.  Applied  to  the 
person  of  Jesus,  this  illicit  axiom  has  meant  that  various 
writers,  forming  by  actual  inspection  of  the  race  a  notion 
of  what  manhood  is  and  can  do,  are  accustomed  to 
insist  that  His  experience  and  action  shall  in  no  way 
transcend  the  empirical  outline  thus  drawn.  Hero  is  a 
familiar  category  of  greatness ;  hero,  therefore.  He  at 
most  can  be.  Nothing  could  be  more  certain  than  that 
this  is  the  way  to  miss  the  truth.  Nature,  we  shall  all 
concede,  ^an~bnly  be  understood  if  we  are  prepared  to 
accept  her  originalities  equally  with  her  commonplace ; 
and  in  like  manner,  if  we  wish  to  know  God's  supreme 
will  for  our  salv^ation  we  must  listen  in  lowliness  to  the 
supreme  voice  He  speaks  in ;  the  voice  that  finds  us 
at  greater  depths  of  our  being  than  any  other.  We  know 
comparatively  little  as  to  the  possibihties  of  the  world, 
and  an  intellectual  experience  which  is  sometimes  painful 
reveals  the  perpetual  necessity  of  remaking  our  science 
and  philosophy  to  the  measure  of  quite  unexpected 
realities.  The  wholly  unprecedented  fact  of  Jesus, 
therefore,  in  its  Divine  and  absolute  significance,  is  not 
to  be  rejected  off-hand  as  something  which  the  very 
structure  of  the  human  mind  forbids  it  to  recognise.  .His_ 
solitary  and  all-determining  character .  must  be  looked  at 
as  a  quite  conceivable  reality ;  and  we  must  in  candour 

-  ^  Bergson,  Creative  Evohdion,  51. 


292  THE    PERSON    OF    JESUS    CHRIST 

be  willing  to  acknowledge  that  a  new  conception,  not 
hitherto  called  for,  may  be  required  to  describe  Him. 
We  must  not  force  Him,  so  to  say,  to  be  the  mere  hero 
or  genius  He  has  no  interest  in  being.  To-day  as  of 
old  He  hides  Himself  from  those  who  would  take  Him  by 
violence  to  make  Him  king. 

This,  then,  is  the  first  method  in  which  modern 
theology  has  tended  to  put  Christology  aside.  It  places 
Jesus  wholly  on  the  side  of  reality  we  call  human, 
and  then  denies  consistently  enough  that  Christology  is 
part  of  Theology  as  the  doctrine  of  God.  To  the  faith 
inspired  by  the  New  Testament,  on  the  other  hand,  this 
is  a  method  excluded  by  the  single  consideration  that 
we  cannot  state  the  Christian  thought  of  God  except  as 
we  include  Christ  in  our  statement.  He  is  an  integral 
constituent  of  what,  for  us,  God  means.  The  richness 
of  significance  present  in  the  word  Divine  as  a  fruit  of 
the  Christian  experience  of  redemption,  is  not  capable 
of  being  expressed  save  by  reference  to  the  Son  as 
really  as  to  the  Father.  This  fact  renders  a  Christology 
essential. 

The  second  point  of  view  from  which  modern 
Christological  thinking  may  be  deprecated  as  superfluous 
is  that  of  literal  fidelity  to  the  definition  of  Chalcedon. 
That  definition  may  be  regarded  as  at  once  complete 
in  theory  and  legally  binding  on  all  later  ages.  It  is 
true,  no  serious  mind  will  affect  indifference  to  the 
Fathers'  long  labour  in  this  domain ;  we  can  never  over- 
estimate the  value  of  their  unflinching  witness  to  the 
incarnation,  or  the  resoluteness  with  which,  in  spite  of 
great  temptations  to  error,  they  affirmed  in  symbolic 
documents  the  perfectness  and  integrity  of  our  Lord's 
manhood.  Nictea  is  a  position  gained  once  for  all. 
Chalcedon,  on  the  other  hand,  betrays  a  certain  tendency 
not  merely  to  define  but  to  theorise.  It  embodies,  even 
if  faintly  and  as  it  were  by  allusion,  a  particular  form  of, 
interpretation  which  it  is  no  real  gain   but  a  distinct  loss 


DEFECTS    OF   TRADITIONAL    DOCTRINE  293 

to  cany  back  in  our  minds  to  tlie  study  of  the  Gospels. 
It  is  one  thing  to  hold  that  in  returning  to  the  Synoptics 
we  must  bring  with  us  the  light  of  the  Epistles,  for  this 
means  simply  that  the  testimony  of  the  apostles  to  Christ 
is  a  prolongation,  as  well  as  a  consequence,  of  Christ's 
testimony  to  Himself.  It  is  quite  another  thing  to  hold 
that  in  reading,  say,  St.  Mark  we  ought  to  keep  the 
Chalcedon  formula  in  the  background  of  our  minds,  and 
interpret  what  we  read  in  view  of  its  authoritative  terms. 
That  is  to  ignore  the  scientific  historv  of  dogma. 

At  the  outset  of  our  independent  study,  then,  it  is  well 
that  we  should  consider  certain  reasons  which  preclude  a 
simple  or  literal  acceptance  of  tradition.  It  is  not  merely 
that  the  influence  of  the  Logos  idea  upon  tradition  was 
immense,  and  not  at  all  times  salutary.  It  is  not  merely 
that  there  are  more  avenues  than  one  by  which  the  mystery 
of  our  Lord's  person  can  be  approached,  and  that  of  these 
possibilities  tradition  chose  one  that  offers  immense  diffi- 
culties to  a  history -loving  age.  These  are  minor  questions. 
For  modern  thought  the  chief  defect  in  strictly  traditional 
Christology  has  been  its  insistence,  not  accidentally  but 
on  principle,  upon  what  for  brevity  is  called  the  doctrine 
of  the  two  natures.  Let  us  take  this  doctrine  in  a 
convenient  form  supplied  by  the  Westminster  Confession : 
"Two  whole,  perfect,  and  distinct  natures,  the  Godhead 
and  the  manhood,  were  inseparably  joined  together  in 
one  person,  without  conversion,  composition,  or  confusion." 
The  sense  of  the  important  word  "  distinct "  is  to  be 
gathered  from  a  later  dictum  in  the  same  chapter : 
"  Christ,  in  the  work  of  mediation,  acteth  according  to 
both  natures,  by  each  nature  doing  that  which  is  proper 
to  itself."  ^  This  view  of  the  Divine-human  personality, 
present  even  in  the  invicem  of  Leo's  Epistle,  is  that  in 
which  tradition  came  to  rest,  but  which  now  fails  to 
satisfy  the  great  bulk  of  evangelical  theologians.  We 
need  not  at  this  point  recall  the  scholastic  subtlety  and 
artifice  of  the  communicatio  idiomatum   developed  with  an 

'  0.  viii.  2. 


294  THE    PERSON    OF   JESUS    CHRIST 

ever-increasing  complexity  in  post-Eeformcation  days,  and 
issuing  in  an  abstractness  of  conception  sadly  unlike  the 
mobile  realities  of  Jesus'  life.  Neither  is  it  simply  that 
the  term  "  nature "  turns  out  to  be  insufficiently  ethical 
for  its  purpose,  and  is  in  some  ways  peculiarly  unfitted 
to  serve  as  a  designation  of  Godhead.  For  here,  it  is 
possible,  a  compromise  may  be  effected.  Discarding  its 
technical  and  rigid  sense,  we  may  hold  that  human 
"  nature "  means  everything  pertaining  to  man's  proper 
constitution,  the  whole  sum  of  his  spiritual  and  bodily 
endowments ;  while  on  the  other  hand  Divine  "  nature " 
is  equivalent  to  all  that  forms  part  of  the  true  being  of 
God.  If  these  two  be  put  together,  we  may  then  say  that 
Jesus  Christ,  the  God-man,  is  Himself  a  living  unity  of 
both.  But  apart  from  this  (it  may  be)  not  insurmountable 
objection,  two  fatal  difficulties  remain. 

First,  the  doctrine  of  the  two  natures,  in  its  tradi- 
tional form,  imports  into  the  life  of  Christ  an  incredible 
and  thoroughgoing  dualism.  In  place  of  that  perfect 
unity  which  is  felt  in  every  impression  of  Him,  the 
whole  is  bisected  sharply  by  the  fissure  of  distinction.  No 
longer  one,  He  is  divided  against  Himself.  It  has  always 
been  perceived  that  a  dualism  of  this  kind,  if  more  than 
a  form  of  words,  annuls  the  very  thought  of  redemption 
by  means  of  God's  self-manifestation  in  flesh.  Divine 
and  human  alternately  vitiates  the  truth  of  incarnation. 
The  simplicity  and  coherence  of  all  that  Christ  was  and 
did  vanishes,  for  God  is  not  after  all  living  a  human  life. 
On  the  contrary,  He  is  still  holding  Himself  at  a  distance 
from  its  experience  and  conditions.  There  has  been  no 
saving  descent.  Christ  executed  this  as  God,  it  is  said, 
and  suffered  that  as  man.  It  could  not  be  otherwise,  since 
in  the  last  resort  deity  is  impassible.  Now  this  leaves  a 
profoundly  disappointing  impression  of  unethical  mystery 
and  even,  in  a  sense,  duplicity.  It  means  that  the 
reader  of  the  Gospels  has  constantly  to  be  on  guard 
against  his  own  instinctive  intuitions.  The  self-conscious- 
ness of  Jesus,  as  depicted  by  the  evangelists,  we  may  call 


THE   TWO-NATURE    DOCTRINE  295 

Divine  or  human  as  we  please ;  to  express  the  whole 
truth  we  must  call  it  both  at  once.  But  it  is  a  single 
consciousness  after  all ;  it  moves  always  as  a  spiritual 
unity ;  and  separatist  or  divisive  theories  do  a  grave  dis- 
service not  merely  to  clear  thinking,  but  to  religious 
truth  and  power.  Always  the  result  has  been  that  deity 
and  humanity  in  Christ  are  joined  in  ways  so  external 
that  either  may  be  contemplated  and  (so  to  speak) 
analysed  in  abstraction  from  the  other.  It  is  an  un- 
questioned merit  in  the  ecclesiastical  Christology  that  it 
brings  out  emphatically  the  basal  oneness  of  Christ  with 
God,  insisting  further  that  this  oneness  is,  in  ultimate 
character,  mysterious ;  it  is  a  grave  fault,  on  the  other 
hand,  that  it  should  so  construe  this  mystery  as  to  get 
wholly  out  of  touch  with  the  actualities  of  the  New 
Testament.  Briefly,  the  doctrine  of  the  two  natures,  if 
taken  seriously,  gives  us  two  abstractions  instead  of  one 
reality,  two  impotent  halves  in  place  of  one  living  whole. 
It  hypostatises  falsely  two  asi-iccts  of  a  single  concrete 
life — aspects  which  are  so  indubitably  real  that  apart 
from  either  the  whole  fact  would  be  quite  other  than  it 
is,  yet  not  in  themselves  distinctly  functioning  substanti- 
alities which  may  be  logically  estimated  or  adjusted  to 
each  other,  or  combined  in  unspiritual  modes. 

In  the  second  place,  there  is  a  difficulty  concerned 
with  the  person  in  which  the  two  natures  are  held  to  be 
"  inseparably  joined  together."  Once  more  we  are  obliged 
to  report  unfavourably  on  the  term  "nature,"  this  time 
from  a  rather  different  point  of  view.  The  ancient 
dogma  proceeds  on  the  definite  assumption  that,  in  both 
God  and  man,  there  exists  a  complex  whole  of  attri- 
butes and  qualities,  which  can  be  understood  and  spoken 
about  as  a  "  nature "  enjoying  some  kind  of  real  being 
apart  from  the  unifying  or  focal  Ego ;  wliereas  nothing 
is  more  certain  than  that  it  is  within  personal  experience, 
and  only  there,  that  all  the  varied  factors  of  our  human 
life  —  intellectual,  moral,  emotional,  social  —  have  any 
proper  existence  or  reality.     To  put  it  frankly,  when  we 


296  THE    PERSON    OF   JESUS    CHRIST 

abstract  from  personality — the  spirit  which  gathers  the 
manifold  particulars  into  unity  and  suffuses  each  with  the 
glow  and  intimacy  of  specifically  conscious  life — what  we 
vaguely  call  "  human  nature "  is  not  human  nature  in 
the  least.  It  is  at  most  hypothetical  raw  material, 
which,  if  taken  up  into  and  shot  through  with  self-con- 
sciousness, becomes  an  organic  factor  in  a  real  human 
experience,  but  in  separation,  as  untenanted  or  by  itself, 
it  is  no  more  human  nature  than  hydrogen  by  itself 
is  aquatic  nature.  We  must  not  be  tempted  into  the 
obvious  mistake  of  regarding  one  element  in  a  living 
unity  as  being  the  same  thing  outside  the  unity  as  within 
it.  Now  in  tradition  human  nature  is  thus  taken  (even 
if  it  be  only  provisionally)  as  real  apart  from  personality. 
According  to  the  technical  phrase,  the  manhood  is  anhy- 
postatic.  What  constitutes  the  person  is  the  Ego  of  the 
pre-existent  Logos,  who  assumes  into  union  with  His  own 
hypostasis  that  whole  complex  briefly  described  as  "  human 
nature,"  conveying  to  it  the  properties  of  His  divinity. 
Certain  teachers  of  the  Church,  who  felt  keenly  the 
unreal  character  of  an  impersonal  humanity,  strove  to 
redress  the  balance  by  asserting  that  our  Lord's  manhood 
is  personal  separately  or  in  its  own  right,  with  the 
unavoidable  result  that  two  personalities  came  only  too 
plainly  to  be  predicated  of  the  one  Christ.  A  twofold 
personality,  however,  is  not  merely  something  that  we 
fail  to  understand ;  it  is  something  we  see  quite  well  to 
be  impossible.  In  fact,  a  being  in  whom  now  the  God. 
acts,  now  the  man,  is  equally  repellent  to  fiiith  and, 
theory.  It  implies  that  to  reach  the  Godhead  we  must 
pass  out  beyond  the  manhood,  and  vice  versa — the  two 
being  so  utterly  heterogeneous  and  disparate  that  no  true 
union  is  conceivable. 

This  dilemma,  then — the  Scylla  of  a  duplex  person- 
ality and  the  Chary bdis  of  an  impersonal  manhood — has 
invariably  proved  fatal  to  the  doctrine  of  two  natures. 
If  it  takes  Jesus'  manhood  seriously,  as  the  New  Testa-' 
ment  of  course  does  by  instinct,  it  makes  shipwreck  on 


THE    TWO-NATURE    DOCTRINE  297 

the  notion  of  a  double  Self.  If,  on  the  other  liand,  it 
insists  on  the  unity  of  the  person,  the  unavoidable  result 
is  to  abridge  the  integrity  of  the  manhood  and  present  a 
Figure  whom  it  is  difficult  to  identify  with  the  Jesus 
of  the  Synoptic  Gospels.  For  tradition  the  unity  of 
the  person  is  always  a  problem,  and  to  the  last  a 
mystery ;  for  the  New  Testament  it  is  the  first  reality 
we  touch.  For  tradition  it  appears  as  a  hypothetical 
conclusion  tentatively  posited  at  the  close  of  intricate 
processes  of  reasoning ;  for  the  New  Testament  it  is  given 
in  a  direct  and  original  impression.  For  tradition  the 
question  is  that  of  uniting  two  abstractions  which  have 
been  defined  in  bare  contrast  to  each  other ;  for  a  mind 
which  takes  its  religion  from  the  New  Testament  the 
problem  is  to  investigate  the  grounds  which  have  led 
Christians  in  every  age  to  confess  this  concrete  historic 
person,  Jesus  Christ,  as  God.  If  objection  be  made  to 
this  ever-renewed  work  of  re-interpretation,  as  impeaching 
the  final  truth  of  Clialcedon,  two  considerations,  I  think, 
may  be  urged  by  way  of  answer.  First,  it  is  impossible 
to  believe  that  the  human  intelligence  has  made  no  pro- 
gress, since  the  fifth  century,  in  the  precision  or  delicacy 
of  its  instruments,  or  that  this  progress  is  in  no  way  to 
the  advantage  of  Christian  thought.  Secondly,  each 
modern  writer,  whatever  his  orthodoxy,  does  in  fact  put 
a  more  or  less  modern  construction  upon  the  categories 
of  the  ancient  Church.  It  must  be  so,  unless  he  is 
content  merely  to  repeat  the  conciliar  phrases.  No 
history  at  all  can  be  written,  or  any  exposition  of  truth 
historically  received,  the  writing  of  which  is  not  linked  to 
present  experience  by  a  secret  bond,  freshening  the  point 
of  view,  and  thus  importing  novel  and  valuable  elements 
of  truth.  Only  a  deeply  felt  interest  in  the  present  gives 
power  to  reanimate  the  past. 

Furthermore,  it  is  necessary  to  redress  the  balance 
which  had  been  disturbed  by  the  partial  absence  from 
the  patristic  mind  of  a  steady  regard  for  the  manhood 
of  Jesus.     No  modern  reader  can  be  unconscious  of  the 


298  THE    PERSON    OF   JESUS    CHRIST 

docetic  strain  present  in  much  early  writing.  Too  often, 
perhaps  most  typically  in  Cyril,  the  humanity  of  Christ 
is  set  forth  as  little  more  than  semblance ;  and  we  have 
seen  how  this  bias  more  and  more  pressed  on  mediaeval 
thought,  and  at  last  virtually  obliterated  in  the  mind  of 
the  Church  expositor  the  significance  of  New  Testament 
words  as  to  Jesus'  liability  to  temptation,  infirmity,  and 
every  wholesome  human  feeling.  Distinct  statements 
about  His  growth  in  wisdom  and  the  like  were  ignored  or 
twisted  in  a  false  direction.  It  seemed  as  though  union 
with  the  Logos  had  denaturalised  His  experience  as  man. 
How  a  corrective  movement  set  in  with  the  Eeformation 
— a  movement  anthropocentric  in  the  sense  that  it  took 
human  facts  as  point  of  departure — and  how  vast  gains 
accrued  thereby  to  the  modern  religious  estimate  of  Jesus, 
we  have  endeavoured  to  explain.  The  Church  received  a 
new  impression  of  His  actual  career  and  of  the  signifi- 
cance of  His  Messianic  consciousness.  Not  only  so ;  but 
it  is  now  impossible  for  us  to  adopt — as  is  done  in  much 
traditional  Christology — a  minimising  tone  respecting  the 
immensity  of  sacrifice  made  by  God  in  becoming  man, 
with  a  life  lived  in  flesh  and  defined  by  the  limits  of 
mundane  experience.  A  partially  de-ethicising  tendency 
of  the  kind  just  noted  was  naturally  accompanied  by  a 
less  than  moral  view  of  sacraments,  and  of  their  mode 
of  action  in  the  soul ;  and  it  is  worth  noting  that  when 
the  Eeformers  turned  back  resolutely  to  the  historic 
Christ,  as  God's  only  Son  and  our  Eedeemer,  they  re- 
vived also  the  primitive  apostolic  conception  of  Baptism 
and  the  Lord's  Supper,  as  conveying  to  men  no  magical 
grace  or  semi-physical  influence  or  blessing,  but  the  Lord 
Jesus  Christ  in  His  wiiole  saving  power.  At  each  point 
a  fresh  view  of  Christ  quickened  their  sense  of  historic 
fact. 

We  conclude,  therefore,  that  faith  in  Christ  is  not  to 
be  confused  with  adhesion  to  a  particular  Christological 
formula,  and  that  the  doctrine  of  two  natures,  in  the 
rigid   abstract  shape  given  it  by  tradition,  is  detachable 


THE    PROBLEM    OF    CHRIST  299 

from  the  believing  estimate  of  our  Lord.  If  this  be  so, 
the  effort  to  reinterpret  the  premises  and  implications  of 
faith  in  Him  is  no  mere  venial  exercise  of  intelligence, 
but  a  duty  to  the  evangelic  mission  of  the  Church. 
Where  the  Spirit  of  the  Lord  is,  there  is  liberty.  As 
Kiihler  puts  it,  "  He  who  finds  the  essence  of  the 
traditional  dogma  in  its  sharp  rejection  of  heresy,  or  its 
scholastic  form,  commits  the  blunder  of  mixing  up  theology 
and  faith.  On  the  other  hand,  he  who  regards  it  as  but 
the  historic  form  apart  from  which  believing  witness  to 
the  living  God — as  distinct  from  metaphysical  traditions 
— could  not  have  been  saved  for  later  ages,  may  well 
join  hands  with  a  fellow-worker  who  pleads  that  we  need 
another  and  a  new  dogma."  ^ 

But  if  a  mere  verbal  acquiescence  in  tradition  is  out 
of  the  question,  since  it  lends  no  aid  to  the  modern 
student,  a  distaste  for  certain  minor  particulars  of  the 
ancient  dogma  is  by  no  means  equivalent  to  a  renunciation 
of  all  Christology.  We  cannot  appeal  to  men  not  to 
think.  They  do  not  leave  their  intelligence  behind  them 
when  they  become  Christians.  Hence  we  may  anticipate 
that  now,  as  in  the  early  centuries,  constructive  principles 
are  being  slowly  worked  out,  in  the  hope  that  by  their 
means  we  may  attain  to  a  deeper  understanding  of  Him 
in  whom  God  has  drawn  near  to  us.  In  every  age  minds 
which  have  been  quickened  and  inspired  by  Christ  will 
continue  to  pour  forth  new  thoughts  concerning  His 
person  and  His  work.  It  will  always  be  felt  that 
"  difficulties  which  are  themselves  the  creation  of  the 
intellect  must  be  intellectually  disposed  of."  It  is  not  an 
objection  to  this  that  in  due  time  our  interpretations  like- 
wise will  become  obsolete  and  insufficient.  It  must  be 
considered  that  for  an  ever  larger  proportion  of  earnest 
men  there  is  virtually  no  middle  course  between  holding 
a  doctrine  on  grounds  which  can  be  really  even  if 
imperfectly  apprehended  by  the  mind,  and  discarding  the 
^  Angetoandte  Dogmen,  137. 


300  THE    PERSON    OF    JESUS    CHRIST 

doctriue  in  question  altogether.  A  Christ  whom  they 
cannot  place  luminously  in  relation  to  life  or  thought  is  a 
Christ  with  no  reality  for  them.  Moreover,  it  is  vain  to 
speak  as  if  ours  alone  were  the  responsibility  of  agitating 
these  great  issues.  Already  various  definite  modern 
theories  of  Christ  have  been  placed  before  the  world ; 
some  of  them,  it  may  well  be,  are  of  a  kind  we  have  no 
option  but  to  reject ;  and  we  cannot  suppose  that  it  is 
possible  to  deal  with  them  satisfactorily  save  on  principles 
which  appeal  to  the  Christian  mind  of  our  own  time — 
principles  which  are  consistent  with  each  other  and  would 
find  their  place  in  a  positive  and  constructive  statement. 
The  fact  that  each  reasoned  view  of  Christ  should  call  for 
criticism  and  modification  at  the  hands  of  later  ages,  so 
far  from  being  an  embarrassment,  is  a  profound  testimony 
to  the  magnitude  of  the  theme.  Christological  theory  is 
in  truth  like  the  great  cathedral.  "  It  is  ever  beautiful  for 
worship,  great  for  service,  sublime  as  a  retreat  from  the 
tumult  of  the  world,  and  it  is  for  ever  unfinished."  The 
Christ  whom  any  mind  or  group  of  minds  can  reproduce 
is  not  the  infinite  Eedeemer  of  the  world. 

further,  it  will  scarcely  be  denied  that  the  task  of 
thus  interpreting  Christ  afresh  is  a  vital  part  of  our 
religious  service.  He  is  to  be  loved  with  the  heart,  but 
also  with  the  mind.  It  is  all  but  impossible  for  a 
thoughtful  man  to  adore  Jesus  Christ,  finding  in  Him 
blessedness  and  eternal  life,  and  not  be  conscious  of  a 
powerful  desire  to  reach  coherent  views  of  His  person. 
What  we  already  know  of  Him  has  led  us  to  faith  and 
worship ;  may  not  (he  will  ask)  a  deepened  knowledge,  if 
it  be  attainable,  add  a  yet  profounder  significance  to  our 
confession  of  His  name  ?  Is  it  not  unworthy  that  in  an 
age  when  men  are  prepared  to  spend  time  and  power 
lavishly  in  the  investigation  of  the  properties  of  matter, 
and  each  new  step  towards  the  conquest  of  nature  is 
saluted  with  a  proud  and  eager  gratitude.  Christian 
thinkers  should  flag  in  the  effort  to  reach  lucidity  and 
truth  of  judgment  as  to  the   person  of   our   Lord  ?      Why 


SYSTEMATIC   THOUGHT    REQUIRED  301 

should  we  turn  from  these  problems  so  easily  with  the 
sad  confession  :  Ignoramus  et  lynoraMmns  ?  Such  words — 
though  they  are  often  taken  so — are  no  proof  of  a  peculiar 
susceptibility  to  the  overwhelming  power  of  Christ — the 
mind  being  as  it  were  dumb  before  Him ;  they  suggest, 
rather,  that  the  very  soul  of  the  Gospel- — Immanuel,  God 
with  us — has  so  far  left  us  unimpressed.  Many  writers 
on  doctrine  at  the  present  moment  are  either  dubious  as  to 
the  value  of  systematic  thought  or  afraid  of  their  own 
minds ;  Eitschlianism,  with  all  its  service  to  faith,  has  a 
little  disparaged  the  use  of  reason  in  theology ;  and  of 
nothing  are  we  more  in  need  than  a  wise  and  instructed 
courage.  "We  require  the  brave  heart  that  will  launch  out 
into  the  deep.  Principles  and  methods  may  yet  be  gained, 
based  alike  in  faith  and  reason,  by  means  of  which  a  real 
and  positive  command  of  the  great  verities  of  Christology 
may  be  secured  for  the  intelligence  of  our  own  time.  The 
question  is  ripe  for  re-examination,  not  merely  from  the 
point  of  view  of  the  apologist,  keen  to  win  the  outsider, 
and  tempted  by  this  very  keenness  to  attenuate  the  un- 
speakable gift  in  his  search  for  the  minimum  of  truth  a 
normal  contemporary  can  be  induced  to  accept.  Still 
more  urgently  it  needs  to  be  freshly  scrutinised  from  the 
point  of  view  of  the  Christologian  proper,  whose  part  it  is 
to  formulate,  if  that  be  possible,  all  that  Christ  is  to  the 
fully  surrendered  mind ;  not  permitting  the  poor  average 
of  faith  to  set  itself  up  as  criterion,  but  asking  insist- 
ently who  Christ  must  be  if  He  is  indeed  the  Mediator, 
the  Advocate  with  the  Father,  the  person  who  lias  availed 
as  a  propitiation  for  the  sins  of  the  whole  world.  "We 
have  to  catch  on  our  minds,  not  the  lowest  form  of  belief 
compatible  with  a  profession  of  Christianity,  but  some- 
thing of  the  incredible  wonder  of  the  Jesus  who  ransomed 
us  with  His  blood.  A  recent  writer  on  some  cardinal 
elements  of  the  Gospel  has  insisted  on  "  the  demand  they 
make  for  an  enlargement  of  human  faculty  to  take  in  the 
unimagined  greatness  newly  revealed  in  them  by  God  "  ; 
and  this  sense  of  dilation,  of  infinitv,  of  inexhaustible  and 


302  THE    PERSON    OF    JESUS    CHRIST 

unending  magnitude,  is  the  element  we  are  most  of  all 
bound  to  pass  into  our  theoretic  statements.  It  may  be 
taken  as  certain  that  the  student  of  Christology  will 
undergo  in  the  field  of  theory  the  same  experience  of 
perpetually  renewed  effort  to  grasp  a  transcendent  object 
as  he  encounters  in  the  realm  of  devotion.  In  both 
spheres,  of  doctrine  as  of  faith,  it  transpires  that  each 
new  conception  of  Christ  we  form,  only  to  dismantle  and 
reshape  it  later  on  the  score  of  inadequacy,  gives  place 
to  one  always  more  broad  and  deep  and  high. 

One  point  still  remains.  Shall  we  aim  at  a  meta- 
physical view,  or  shall  we  rest  in  an  ethical  Christ,  asking 
no  hard  questions  that  may  lead  out  over  the  seas  of 
tliought  ?  Are  transcendent  problems  to  be  discounted 
from  the  beginning  as  irrelevant  or  at  all  events  quite 
subordinate  ?  What  is  our  duty — to  think  things  out, 
even  if  this  should  mean  a  speculative  interpretation  of 
Jesus,  or  in  reverent  agnosticism  to  deprecate  intrusion 
into  such  high  matters  and  stay  safely  within  the  frontiers 
of  a  verifiable  experience  ?  Advocates  of  the  less 
ambitious  plan  are  now  more  numerous  than  ever. 
Doubtless,  too,  so  far  as  it  goes,  their  guiding  interest 
is  a  positive  one.  It  insists  on  redemption  as  a  boon 
appreciable  mainly  through  conscience  and  feeling ;  it 
dwells  on  the  self-consciousness  of  Jesus  as  the  very  mirror 
of  God's  heart ;  and  these  profoundly  evangelical  positions 
merit  and  will  receive  wide  sympathy.  In  less  commend- 
able fashion,  its  tacit  plea  that  faith  is  a  necessity  but 
Christology  a  luxury  makes  appeal  to  the  distaste  for 
systematic  thought  so  curiously  common  in  our  time ;  and 
the  appeal  which  is  primarily  meant  for  all  who  distrust 
speculation  may  also  be  welcomed  by  the  indolent.  In 
certain  cases,  moreover,  an  exclusive  emphasis  on  what  is 
called  the  moral  view  of  Christ  may  cover  negative  con- 
clusions as  to  His  real  transcendence. 

In  this  general  contention  much,  of  course,  is  un- 
deniable.     Dr.  Forsytli  has  shown  us  that  the  moralising 


THE    METArHYSIC    OF   THE    CONSCIENCE  303 

of  dogma  is  an  essential  of  all  modern  Christian  thought.^ 
The  conception  of  Divine  omnipotence,  for  example,  must 
be  transposed  from  the  key  of  barely  ontological  ideas  into 
that  of  ethical  relations  as  between  persons.  The  almighti- 
ness  of  God  is  exerted  not  in  vacuo,  but  in  a  moral  universe 
and  under  moral  conditions  ;  a  fact  with  an  obviously  direct 
bearing  on  the  question  of  what  God  may  do  for  man's 
salvation.  It  is  more  than  possible  that  by  this  ethicising 
of  the  Divine  attributes  we  may  relieve  some  of  the  gravest 
problems  of  the  incarnation,  particularly  those  which  are 
due  less  to  ascertained  facts  of  history  than  to  the  physical 
and  all  but  mechanical  thought-forms  employed  by  the 
early  Church.  Thus  far,  then,  the  plea  for  ethical 
categories  is  abundantly  justified.  Conceptions  which 
have  lost  all  relation  to  the  conscience  are  of  no  more 
use  for  our  purpose.  The  re-statement  of  Christology  in 
fully  personal  and  spiritual  terms  may  be  a  long  and 
exacting  task ;  but  it  is  unavoidable,  and  if  carried  forward 
on  sound  lines  may  well  hope  for  results  of  a  permanently 
valid  character. 

At  the  same  time,  it  is  clear  that  a  metaphysic  of  the 
conscience  is  none  the  less  metaphysical.  Guided  as  it  is, 
like  all  knowledge,  by  an  interest  more  vital  than  specu- 
lative, it  is  at  the  same  time  an  interpretation  of  the  real. 
The  moral  certainties  of  redeemed  men  bring  them  in 
touch  with  the  last  and  highest  facts  in  the  universe. 
There  is  no  incognizable  Absolute,  no  more  authentic  or 
final  realm  of  being,  from  the  apprehension  of  which  they 
are  in  the  last  resort  debarred,  nor  is  faith  thus  morally 
conditioned  subject  after  all  to  the  appellate  jurisdiction 
of  philosophy.  By  all  means  let  us  recognise  the  truth 
that  it  is  through  the  medium  of  conscience  that  Christ  is 
known  in  His  ultimate  and  universal  significance  and  His 
relation  to  God  and  man ;  but  let  us  also  recollect  that 
the  Christ  thus  ethically  known  pertains  ultimately  to 
the  sphere  of  reality  with  which  the  metaphysician  is 
concerned,  and  that  there  exists  no  legitimate  point  of 
^  Person  and  Place  of  Jesus  Christ,  Lects.  viii.  and  12, 


304  THE   PERSON    OF   JESUS    CHRIST 

view  in  which  He  appears  as  a  merely  relative  phenomenon. 
Moral  perception,  in  fact,  is  our  best  guide  to  the  nature 
of  true  being ;  if  we  distrust  the  utterances  of  the  moral 
faculty,  there  seems  to  be  no  reason  why  we  should  ever 
trust  our  minds  at  all.  Between  the  ethical  and  the 
metaphysical  view  of  Christ,  then,  there  is  no  final 
antagonism.  The  ethical,  when  taken  as  ultimately  true, 
is  the  metaphysical  ;  it  is  metaphysical  in  the  only  sense 
relevant  to  a  moral  intelligence.  The  phenomenon  of  moral 
worth  is  reality  appearing  to  our  minds.  The  reality  is 
not  behind  the  worth,  or  within  it  as  a  secret  core ;  it  is 
the  Will,  the  self-conscious  activity,  of  which  the  worth 
is  a  living  attribute.  Hence  if  we  are  inspired  by 
Christian  faith  to  affirm  that  Jesus  Christ  is  identical 
with  God  in  will — a  Will  manifested  in  His  achieve- 
ment— we  have  reached  a  point  beyond  which  no  advance 
is  possible ;  for  in  ethical  terms,  the  highest  terms  avail- 
able, we  have  affirmed  His  ontological  unity  with  God  in 
a  sense  generically  different  from  that  which  is  predicable 
of  man  as  man.  Intelligent  will  is  the  organic  centre 
of  personality ;  and  the  will  of  Jesus  fixes  His  absolute 
status  in  the  world  of  being.  In  every  conceivable  sense 
in  which  this  is  a  t^me  estimate  of  His  person,  it  also  is  a 
metaphysical  estimate. 

No  escape  then  is  possible,  in  this  field  or  any  other, 
from  the  obligation  to  think  things  out  persistently  to  the 
end.  If  we  are  conscious  of  the  spiritual  supremacy  of 
Christ — His  unique  position  in  religious  history,  His 
unique  significance  for  each  soul — we  have  no  choice 
but  to  ask  what  conceptions  of  His  person  are  guaranteed 
by  this  impression.  Once  these  conceptions  have  been 
gained,  they  take  their  place  as  among  the  truest  and 
most  adequate  of  which  the  human  mind  is  capable.  If 
Christian  experience  counts  for  anything,  then  it  counts 
here.  It  is  in  touch  with  reality ;  the  being  which  our 
mind  apprehends  in  Jesus  is  real  being.  A  right  doctrine 
of  His  person,  therefore,  is  not  dealing  with  ideas  which 
are   only  counters — useful  metaphorical   expressions  ulti- 


FAITH    AND    REALITY  305 

mately  unredeemable  by  fact.  It  is  dealing  with  ideas 
necessitated  by  Jesus'  witness  to  Himself  and  the  con- 
firmation of  that  witness  furnished  by  the  story  of  the 
Church.  These  true  ideas  it  is  unnecessary  to  clothe 
in  the  formulas  of  conciliar  theology.  The  language,  the 
categories,  the  intellectual  forms  of  earlier  days  are  in 
certain  respects  not  such  as  we  can  use.  None  the  less 
our  final  thought  of  the  Eedeemer  has  the  same  meaning 
as  of  yore.  The  coinage  of  far-off  ages  may  doubtless  be 
defaced  and  soiled ;  the  inscriptions  set  upon  it  may  be 
in  part  undecipherable.  Yet  the  ore  from  which  the 
ancient  currency  was  struck  is  still  in  our  possession ;  and 
the  task  of  modern  Christology,  as  we  believe,  is  to  stamp 
the  mintage  freshly,  sending  it  forth  for  the  service  of  a 
new  generation. 


20 


CHAPTER   II. 

CHRISTOLOGY  AND  THE  HISTORIC  CHRIST. 

Among  modern  theologians  there  is  a  general  disposition 
to  agree  that  if  Christology  is  to  be  valid  for  the  modern 
mind,  its  point  of  reference  and  of  departure  must  be 
fixed  in  the  Jesus  Christ  of  history.  This  was  in  fact 
the  new  Keformation  gospel.  In  Western  Catholicism 
the  idea  had  become  regnant  that  Christianity  is  the 
Church,  while  the  Church  in  turn  is  Christ,  the  perpetual 
incarnation  of  God  in  the  world.  Official  doctrine  made 
no  attempt  to  control  Christology  by  recorded  fact. 
Jesus  was  hidden  by  a  crowd  of  saints.  Conceptions  of 
God  prevailed  which  had  little  relation  to  the  Son  who 
alone  makes  known  the  Father.  But  the  Eeformers 
insist  that  God  is  sphered  and  embodied  for  us  in  Christ ; 
that  only  there  is  He  displayed  as  Eedeemer ;  and  that 
a  preacher's  duty  is  to  make  men  see  in  Christ  "  the 
work  of  God  and  His  Fatherly  heart  towards  us,"  not  to 
"  talk  much  of  God  in  the  heathen  manner."  Schleier- 
macher  too  rang  out  this  note  subsequently  to  the 
A  ufkldrung ;  and  Kitschliauism,  be  its  faults  what  they 
may,  has  rendered  an  invaluable  service  by  holding  the 
Church's  mind  close  to  the  actual  person  of  our  Lord. 
Its  influence    has    coincided    significantly  with  the   ever- 

LiTERATtJRE— Forrest,  The  Christ  of  History  mid  Experience*,  1903  ; 
Herrmann,  Communion  with  God,  1906  ;  Kirn,  Glaube  und  Geschichte, 
1900  ;  Sanday,  Christologies  Ancient  and  Modern,  1910  ;  Kiihler,  Der 
sogenannte  historische  Jesus  und  der  geschichtliche  hihlische  Christus^,  1896  ; 
Wobbermin,  Geschichte  und  Historic  in  der  Religionswissenschaft,  1911  ; 
Gordon,  The  Christ  of  To-day,  1895  ;  Ritschl,  Justification  and  Eeconcilia- 
tion,  1900  J  Simpson,  Fact  of  Christ,  1900. 

306 


FAITH    AND    HISTORY  807 

increasing  tendency  to  put  aside  convention  and  look  at 
the  reality  of  things. 

It    is    because    it    is    a    religion    for  the    sinful  that 
Christianity  is  indissolubly  implicated  with  historic  fact, 
and  specifically  with  the  fact  of  Christ.      It  is  a  religion 
of  atonement.      God  has  reconciled  us  to  Himself  through 
His  Son,  attesting  His  gracious  will  by  Jesus  who  lived 
and  died  and  rose  again.     Whatever  satisfaction  Christi- 
anity may  render  to  the  intellectual  or  aesthetic  needs  of 
mankind,  is  due  to  its  having  first  met  and  satisfied  the 
need  of  salvation.      But  the  need  of  salvation  cannot  be 
satisfied  by  a  bare  idea.     Not   mere  ideas  but  facts  are 
indispensably  vital ;    facts  which   have    existence   in    the 
same    field    of    reality  as  we    ourselves,  i.e.  the    field    of 
history.     Nature  may  indeed  reveal  a  power  indefinitely 
great    and    a    wisdom    indefinitely    wide,  but    as    regards 
forgiveness    it    is    silent.     That   is    a    transcendent  word ; 
sun,  moon,  and  stars  cannot  utter  it,  nor  can  earth  and 
sea.      It  is  in  history,  and   only  there,  that    the  infinite 
love  of  the  Eternal  is  put  within  our  reach  and  we  are 
made  certain  of  it  as  a  personal  and  inalienable  possession. 
Nor  is  it  in  the  course  of   the  world    at    large  that  we 
encounter  God  thus ;  for  history  in  general  is  filled  with 
dubious  voices,  with  warring  currents  of  tendency  which 
cross  and  mingle.     God's  Fatherhood,  in  the  loftiest  and 
most    subduing    sense,  is    known    only  in    Jesus.     He  is 
indeed    present    in    all    events,    ruling    past    and    future 
ceaselessly ;    but  yet   in  one  unique  tract   of   reality  the 
veil  upon  His  working  grows  diaphanous,  and  we  behold 
His    very    heart.      It    is    as    with    life-blood    circulating 
through  the  whole  body,  yet  here   or  there  so  near  the 
surface  that  by  a  touch   we  feel  the  pulsing  flow.      Only 
in  the  fact  of  Jesus  does  a  basis  for   religion  exist    not 
made  by  man,  but  given  by  God  Himself.     Apart  from 
this  Eedeemer,  Christianity  is  not  redemption  in  the  least  ; 
it  is  but  one  more  impotent  abstraction. 

Nevertheless    to    urge    this     conviction    will     to-day 
almost  certainly  provoke  the   retort    that    to    base    faith 


308  THE   PERSON    OF   JESUS    CHRIST 

on  history  is  the  most  shortsighted  of  mistakes.  Faith 
demands  a  Christ  who  has  absolute  value  for  our 
relation  with  God,  but  can  anything  absolute  emerge  in 
the  conditioned  series  of  time-events  ?  How  shall  the 
absolute  appear  in  time  and  place  ?  Has  not  religion 
itself  displayed  an  inveterate  tendency  to  lift  what  it 
reckons  holy  out  of  the  shifting  stream  of  change  into 
the  region  of  the  eternal,  the  immutable  ? 

The  objection  may  be  put  from  two  points  of  view 
and  buttressed  by  two  kinds  of  argument.  On  the 
philosophical  side,  it  derives  ultimately  from  the  Greek 
view  of  things,  which  set  out  from  the  study  of  physical 
nature,  not  of  man — who  is  made  for  history,  and  is  "  a 
creature  of  days  and  years  and  also  of  generations" — and 
which  tended  to  disparage  the  succession  of  human  events 
as  something  proper  only  to  the  realm  of  jivecri'i,  the 
sphere  of  change  and  incalculable  variety,  which  can 
never  satisfy  the  properly  metaphysical  interest.  No  one 
raised  the  problem  of  what  progress  means,  or  human 
history  as  a  whole.  No  one  inquired  whether  conceivably 
it  has  been  "  assigned  to  man  to  have  history  for  the 
manner  in  which  he  should  manifest  himself,"  ^  and 
whether  accordingly  in  our  search  for  the  meaning  of  the 
world  we  are  bound  not  to  stop  short  with  principles, 
truths,  laws  because  what  we  seek  is  given  only  in  facts, 
events,  historical  transactions.  In  modern  times,  the 
same  objection  has  never  been  expressed  more  powerfully 
than  in  the  famous  word  of  Lessing :  "Contingent 
historical  truths  can  never  afford  proof  of  necessary 
truths  of  reason."  No  absolute  verity  can  be  mediated 
through  events  of  time.  Between  the  two  lies  an  ugly 
broad  ditch.  This  has  been  called  by  far  the  strongest 
blow  yet  struck  at  Christianity.  Spinoza  argued  on  similar 
lines  ;  and  Kant,  notwithstanding  a  willing  admission  that 
the  ideal  took  shape  and  form  in  the  historic  Jesus,  does 
not  hesitate  to  assert  that  the  question  whether  Jesus'  ful- 
filment of  the  ideal  was  complete  is  relatively  unimportant. 

^  See  Life  of  Principal  Rainy,  by  P.  Carnegie  Simpson,  i.  204. 


FAITH    AND    HISTORY  809 

Faith  and  history  live  in  disparate  worlds  which  never 
intersect.  Fichte  crowns  the  series  by  the  declaration 
that  it  is  contrary  to  the  Christian  religion  to  demand 
faith  in  the  liistoric  Christ.  If  a  man  is  in  fact  united 
to  God,  his  duty  is  not  to  be  perpetually  going  back  upon 
the  way  to  such  union,  but  to  live  in  the  thing.  Any- 
thing else  invades  true  spirituality.  God  is  revealed  in 
conscience  and  in  tlie  main  march  of  events  ;  this  is  all 
we  know  on  earth,  all  we  need  to  know. 

The  answer  to  Lessiug  plainly  is,  in  the  first  place, 
that  history  is  not  contingent.  At  all  events  for  the 
Christian  mind,  sure  of  God  and  of  God's  government,  bare 
contingency  is  meaningless.  Curiously  enough,  it  was 
Lessing  who  did  more  than  all  his  contemporaries  to  lift 
men  above  the  strange  and  arid  prejudice  that  history  is 
only  a  Wirr-warr  of  beings,  happenings,  relations,  and  to 
exhibit  it  as  the  workshop  of  life  both  for  nations  and 
persons.  The  education  of  mankind,  regarding  which  he 
spoke  many  deep  words,  is  in  fact  an  education  by  way  of 
historical  media,  moving  upward  from  limited  and  meagre 
origins,  yet  attaining  in  due  time  to  a  heritage  defined 
and  enriched  through  the  bygone  experiences  of  man. 
Again,  the  Christian  message  does  not  in  any  case  consist 
in  necessary  truths  of  reason.  It  is  not,  for  instance,  a 
necessary  truth  of  reason — a  truth,  that  is,  which  rises 
with  self-evidencing  clearness  in  the  mind  of  every 
normally  intelligent  adult — that  God  is  so  truly  love 
that  He  interposed  to  bless  and  save  mankind.  For 
certainty  here,  we  must  have  the  record  of  definite 
phenomena  accrediting  themselves  to  conscience  and  heart. 
Unless  faith,  like  Antreus  in  the  legend,  stands  firm  on  the 
mother-earth  of  fact,  it  must  come  to  be  spun  senti- 
mentally out  of  the  inner  consciousness;  uncorrected, 
uncontrolled,  uninspired  by  great  actualities.  Again,  if  it 
be  said  the  Gospel  as  involved  in  history  must  consent  to 
be  equally  relative  with  other  facts  of  the  time-series — 
that  it  has  to  choose,  in  short,  between  historicity  and 
finality — the  answer  is  that  this  is  pure  assumption,  and 


310  THE    PERSON   OF   JESUS    CHRIST 

assumption  which  must  be  changed  if  it  conflicts  with 
real  phenomena.  It  may  well  be  even  bad  metaphysics ; 
it  is  so,  if,  as  not  a  few  philosophers  have  begun  to  think, 
life  is  an  eternal  creation  of  novelties,  a  scene  not  of  self- 
identical  persistent  objects  with  unvarying  mutual  relations, 
but  of  the  incessant  uprising  of  the  new  and  impre- 
visible.  For  in  that  case  the  fatal  presupposition  of 
mechanism  as  an  exhaustive  conception  of  the  real 
vanishes,  and  the  only  remaining  question  is  whether 
the  novelty  emergent  at  a  specific  point  in  history  was 
an  absolute  and  all-sufficient  Eedeemer.  Once  more,  it  is 
obvious  that  the  religious  life  of  man  has  always  moved 
upward,  not  by  the  influence  of  abstract  conceptions, 
however  rich  or  versatile,  but  by  the  power  of  great 
personalities.  Each  vast  movement  starts  with  a  man. 
It  rises  into  strength  because  an  idea  and  a  mind  have 
become  fused  in  one — the  thought  embodied  in  a  soul,  the 
soul  dedicated  to  the  thought  and  acting  only  in  its  service. 
This  is  unquestionably  how  concrete  history  has  proceeded 
from  phase  to  phase ;  it  has  moved  by  incessant  new  de- 
partures ;  and  if  the  axioms  of  a  mechanical  psychology 
break  down  helplessly  before  a  Paul,  a  Luther,  or  a 
Wesley,  acknowledging  their  inability  to  deal  with  the 
original  and  inscrutable  factors  these  names  represent,  it 
is  hard  to  see  how  they  can  expect  to  cope  with  the 
incomparable  life  of  Jesus.  Finally,  it  is  found  that  a 
priori  notions  of  historic  relativity  are  extinguished  in 
Jesus'  presence.  They  are  broken  by  redemption  as  an 
experience  as  of  old  Samson  broke  the  restraining  withes. 
The  men  who  followed  Christ  in  Palestine  and  learnt  to 
name  Him  Lord,  those  who  in  every  time  have  felt  the 
sweep  of  His  power  and  the  renewing  impulse  of  His 
Spirit — no  one  of  them  all  but  is  aware  that  in  Jesus  we 
touch  the  supreme  moral  reality  of  the  universe. 

On  the  historical  side,  however,  the  objection  to 
binding  up  faith  with  history  takes  the  form  of  asking 
whether  criticism  of  the  New  Testament  may  not  have 
destroyed  for  good  and  all  the  possibility  of  touching  the 


CHRIST    AND    HISTORICAL    RESEARCH  311 

real  Jesus.  IL  has  been  argued  that  His  personal  existence 
is  a  myth.  Even  if  the  more  judicious  smile  at  this, 
can  we  regard  the  situation  as  satisfactory  wliich  makes 
Christianity  dependent  on  imperfectly  attested  narratives  of 
the  past  ?  Is  not  this  ultimately  to  condemn  the  faith  of 
simple  believers  to  permanent  insecurity  as  the  satellite 
of  scholarship — a  tyranny  quite  as  insupportable  as  that 
of  any  papacy  ?  Or,  turning  the  whole  matter  round, 
may  not  our  exact  knowledge  of  Jesus  prove,  religiously, 
our  fate  ?  After  all,  He  belongs  to  the  first  century. 
Assume  for  the  moment  that  His  disciples  were  able  to 
transmit  His  message  without  falsification  ;  must  He  not 
have  been,  in  a  real  measure,  the  child,  the  creation,  of 
His  own  time  and  land  ?  His  teaching  follows  the 
methods  practised  by  His  prophetic  forerunners.  His 
beliefs  are  drawn  largely  from  the  Old  Testament,  and 
His  conception  of  the  universe  was  that  current  in  His 
day.  Can  His  thought  of  God  have  escaped  quite 
unharmed  ? 

Our  answer  to  this  must  begin  with  the  admission 
that  nothing  in  the  past  can  be  so  certain  for  the  historian, 
•purely  as  an  historian,  as  that  it  will  bear  the  weight  of 
personal  religion.  Historical  research  can  no  more  give 
us  a  Saviour  Christ  than  science  can  give  us  the  living 
God.  Even  if  Christ  were  the  Eedeemer  of  the  world,  and 
knowable  as  such,  it  is  not  in  fact  by  way  of  scholarly  in- 
vestigation that  He  could  be  thus  known.  There  are  matters, 
in  short,  which  history  by  itself  is  incompetent  to  treat 
of ;  for,  as  Professor  James  once  put  it,  "  a  rule  of  thinking 
which  would  absolutely  prevent  me  from  acknowledging 
certain  kinds  of  truth,  if  those  kinds  of  truth  were 
really  there,  would  be  an  irrational  rule."  ^ 

That,  however,  is  but  a  preliminary  point.  The  really 
important  thing  is  that  no  man  is  a  mere  historian,  even 
if  he  tries  to  be.  For  no  man  is  without  a  conscience — 
the  sense  of  unconditional  and  infallible  obligation  ;  hence 
none  can  be  guaranteed  against  the  risk  of  finding  himself 

^  The  Will  to  Believe,  28. 


312  THE   PERSON    OF   JESUS    CHRIST 

in  the  presence  of  One  who  deals  with  us  in  ways  which 
we  know  to  be  God's  ways.  It  may  happen  to  any  man, 
at  any  time,  given  the  witness  of  a  Hving  Church,  to  be 
inescapably  confronted  with  a  Person  who  convicts  him 
of  moral  ruin  yet  offers  him  the  saving  love  of  God.  And 
if  this  should  happen,  he  will  then  know,  with  a  certainty 
which  no  history  can  give  or  take  away,  that  in  this  Jesus 
he  has  touched  and  met  with  God.  The  Gospel  picture 
of  Jesus  carries  with  it  the  demonstration  of  its  own 
veracity.  It  is  not  so  much  that  we  argue  consciously  that 
this  Man  could  not  have  been  described  had  He  not  been 
real ;  rather  He  makes  His  own  overmastering  impression 
and  subdues  us  to  Himself.^  He  is  beheld  as  the  last  and 
highest  fact  of  which  moral  reason  takes  cognizance. 

It  thus  appears  that  the  ground  and  content  of  Chris- 
tian faith  is  eventually  superior  to  the  shifting  results 
of  historic  criticism.  Not  only  so ;  the  conviction  of 
Christ's  power  is  ultimately  unaffected  in  its  central  import 
by  the  progress  of  investigation.  All  investigation  derives 
its  data  from  the  New  Testament  itself,  and  has  therefore 
no  option  but  to  assume  the  truth  of  certain  main  elements 
in  the  apostolic  representation  of  Jesus,  which  yield  the 
sole  criterion  of  reality.  If  Jesus  is  cognizable  at  all.  He 
is  cognizable  in  the  Gospels  and  Epistles ;  no  other  source 
exists.  Besides,  it  is  not  putting  it  too  strongly  to  say  that 
the  Christ  depicted  in  every  part  of  the  New  Teetament 
is  radically  the  same  Christ.  There  is  a  close  similarity, 
for  instance,  between  the  Christology  of  St.  Mark  and  of 
St.  John.  The  Christ  of  St.  Paul,  like  the  Christ  of  all 
the  Gospels,  is  a  crucified  and  risen  Lord ;  throughout, 
the  attitude  of  faith  to  Him  is  identical.  After  a  book 
like  Dr.  Denney's  Jesus  and  the  Gospel,  this  position  may 
be  taken  as  established.  Scientific  inquiry,  therefore,  may 
and  does  force  theology  to  reform  its  methods  of  Scripture 
proof ;  it  cannot  touch  the   Saviour  held  forth,  in  every 

^  Cf.  a  vigorous  sentence  from  Jonathan  Edwards  :  "The  Gospel  of  the 
blessed  God  does  not  go  abroad  a-begging  for  its  evidence  so  much  as  some 
think  ;  it  has  its  highest  and  most  proper  evidence  in  itself  "  ( Works,  v.  178). 


CHRIST    AND    HISTORICAL   RESEARCH  313 

part  of  the  New  Testaincnt,  to  repeutaut  faith.  The  final 
outcome  alike  of  scholarly  exegesis  and  of  simple  Bible 
reading  is  a  more  lucid  appreliension  of  Jesus  Christ  as 
in  the  sovereign  power  of  His  resurrection  He  fills  the 
primitive  believing  consciousness.  This  is  not  to  say  that 
the  whole  task  of  verifying  the  Christian  religion  may 
safely  be  thrown  upon  the  experience  of  the  individual 
believer,  confirmed  by  past  centuries  of  faith.^  The  truth 
about  Jesus  cannot  be  read  off  the  believing  mind 
sivipliciter.  For  it  is  a  believing  mind  only  as  it  has  been 
quickened  by  contact  with  the  revealing  history.  The 
regenerate  soul  is  no  more  real  independently  of  the  historic 
Christ  than  a  child  is  real,  not  to  say  intelligible,  apart 
from  his  parents.  The  experience  of  being  saved  and  the 
knowledge  of  what  God  did  to  save  us  from  one  indivisible 
unity,  and  it  does  not  help  intelligence  in  the  least  to  put 
asunder,  even  provisionally,  what  in  fact  is  joined  together. 
That  faith  should  manufacture  its  own  data,  or  do  any- 
thing but  apprehend  that  by  which  it  is  created,  is 
inconceivable. 

The  position  here  sketched  in  outline  must  not, 
however,  be  hastily  identified  with  a  different  view  super- 
ficially resembling  it.  Especially  the  venerable  Kiihler 
of  Halle  has  set  forth  impressive  arguments  to  the  effect 
that  in  the  last  resort  we  must  simply  be  content  with 
the  witness  of  the  apostles  to  Jesus,  and  that  it  is  idle  to 
seek,  behind  their  testimony,  a  scientifically  reconstructed 
picture  of  Jesus  as  He  was.  The  records,  he  points  out, 
do  not  even  establish  the  order  in  which  the  narrated 
episodes  took  place,  much  less  the  course  of  Jesus'  spiritual 
development.  In  these  circumstances,  any  one  who  aims 
at  a  biography  of  Jesus  is  compelled  to  fill  up  the  meagre 
outline  with  private  fancies,  based  on  psychological  analogies 
which  really  are  irrelevant  to  a  sinless  life.  And  since 
the  evangelists  in  any  case  are  not  chroniclers  but  preachers, 
the  effort  to  disentangle  "  the  historic  Jesus "  from  their 

1  As  is  done  in  the  well-known  argument  ol  Dale,  The  Living  Christ  and 
the  Four  Gospels,  Lects.  i.  and  ii. 


314  THE    PERSON    OP   JESUS    CHRIST 

account  must  be  fruitless,  because  perverted  by  illegitimate 
dogmatic  considerations.  It  was  by  the  apostles'  preaching 
of  Christ  that  the  Church  came  into  existence ;  their 
preaching,  accordingly,  must  remain  the  vital  soil  of  her 
life  and  the  final  court  of  appeal  by  which  the  truth  of 
her  message  is  sanctioned.^ 

In  much  of  this  we  shall  all  acquiesce  gratefully. 
Nevertheless  it  does  not  meet  the  question  whether  after  all 
the  Gospel  can  rest  for  us  simply  on  the  faith  of  other  men. 
If,  as  Luther  reiterates,  faith  and  God  belong  together, 
we  cannot  really  believe  in  anything  but  God  as  He 
makes  Himself  known  to  us.  Even  to  a  New  Testament 
evangelist  it  is  possible  to  say,  in  the  language  of  the 
Samaritans  :  "  Now  we  believe,  not  because  of  thy  speaking  ; 
for  we  have  heard  for  ourselves,  and  know  that  this  is 
indeed  the  Saviour  of  the  world  "  (Jn  4*^).  The  grounds 
of  faith  accessible  to  apostles  are  open  to  us  also.  For 
one  thing,  the  impression  made  on  them  is  itself  an  index 
of  its  cause.  Jesus  revealed  what  He  was  not  merely^ — 
indeed  not  mainly — by  what  He  said,  but  by  the  way  in 
which  His  personality  told  on  others,  fixing  itself  indelibly 
in  their  minds.  This  picture  of  Jesus,  moreover,  once  we 
have  apprehended  it,  can  be  employed  to  control  the 
evangelical  narratives  themselves.  The  gradual  outcome 
of  reverent  familiarity  with  the  Gospel  portrait  of  Jesus  is 
to  put  us  in  possession  of  a  conception  of  His  person,  so 
luminous,  authentic,  and  self-consistent  as  to  release  us 
from  dependence  on  peripheral  details.  The  Christ  shining 
out  upon  us  from  the  sources  is  a  fact  so  real  and  sure 
that  it  tests  and  attests  its  own  constituent  elements. 
And  the  susceptible  reader  of  the  Gospels  simultaneously 
begins  to  find  in  the  Christ  thus  known  a  Eedeemer 
who  both  evokes  the  longing  for  God  and  satisfies  the 
longing  He  evokes.  Thus  the  apostles'  faith  is  for  us  a 
mirror  reflecting  the  actual  Jesus,  and  enabling  us  to  know 
Him  for  ourselves. 

^  Der   sogenannte    Jiistorische    Jesus    und    der   geschichtliche,    biblische 
Christus^  (1896). 


TlIK    INNER    LIFE    OF    JESUS  315 

The  historic  Clnist,  tlicn,  is  the  criterion  alike  of 
faith  and  of  the  Christology  inspired  by  faith.  But 
what  is  the  precise  content  of  this  phrase,  "  the  historic 
Christ "  ?  How  much  does  it  cover  ?  No  present-day 
answer  to  this  question  has  been  more  influential  than 
that  of  Herrmann.  He  points  out  that  the  saving  revela- 
tion of  God  cannot  be  a  mere  multiplicity  of  facts,  which 
could  only  distract  the  mind.  It  must  be  a  unity,  collected 
round  a  fixed  centre  with  which  faith  can  have  immediate 
relations.  And  this  fixed  centre  is  "  the  inner  life  of 
Jesus."  Whatever  else  may  be  in  doubt,  this  at  all  events 
is  incontestably  real.  "  The  one  thing  which  the  Gospels 
will  give  us  as  an  overpowering  reality  is  just  the  inner 
life  of  Jesus  Himself.  .  .  .  Whenever  we  come  to  see 
the  Person  of  Jesus,  then,  under  the  impress  of  that 
inner  life  that  breaks  through  all  the  veils  of  the  story, 
we  ask  no  more  questions  as  to  the  trustworthiness  of 
the  evangelists."  This  picture  of  Jesus  subdues  us ;  it 
is,  as  he  finely  adds,  a  "  free  revelation  of  the  Living  to 
the  living."  ^  At  this  point,  however,  there  emerges  a 
distinction  to  which  Herrmann  clearly  attaches  great 
importance.  It  is  the  distinction  between  the  ground  of 
faith  {Glaiilensfjrund)  and  convictions  generated  by  faith 
(Glauhensgedanken).  The  ground  or  basis  of  faith,  we 
have  seen,  is  the  inner  life  of  Jesus,  a  moral  ultimate 
behind  which  criticism  cannot  penetrate  and  in  virtue 
of  which  Jesus  comes  home  to  us  as  the  personal  mani- 
festation of  a  redeeming  God.  Contrasted  with  this 
unanalysable  datum,  however,  are  beliefs  or  thoughts 
which  do  not  create  faith  but  are  created  by  it,  beliefs 
which  express  truth  sooner  or  later  felt  by  the  Christian 
to  be  involved  in  his  fundamental  trustful  response  to 
Jesus.  Such  beliefs  are  the  affirmation  of  His  Divine 
origin,  His  resurrection,  His  sovereign  and  universal  power. 
Is  this  contrast  valid  ?  In  particular,  are  we  justified 
in  narrowing  "  the  historic  Jesus  "  into  what  Herrmann 
has  designated  His  "  inner  life  "  ? 

^  Communion  with  God,  74-75. 


316  THE    PERSON    OF   JESUS    CHRIST 

He  is  undoubtedly  so  far  right  that  no  legitimate 
development  in  our  conception  of  Christ  can  be  a  bare 
external  addition  to  our  incipient  believing  view.  All 
true  elements  of  an  evangelical  Christology  must  be 
implicit  from  the  first ;  points  to  which  they  can  be 
fastened  when  unfolded  later,  and  which  really  demand 
the  more  complete  statement,  are  given,  though  latently, 
in  the  initial  confession,  "  Jesus  is  Lord,"  Belief  in  the 
resurrection  is  a  case  in  point.  To  grasp  or  acknowledge 
worthily  the  risen  Lord,  a  man  must  have  been  impressed 
with  Jesus  in  a  certain  way.  Our  faith  in  the  resurrec- 
tion, though  it  finds  occasion  in  the  Synoptic  narratives, 
draws  its  intensity  and  passion  from  our  sense  of  Jesus' 
greatness ;  we  so  trust  the  power  and  glory  of  the  Christ 
depicted  in  the  Gospels,  that  the  apostolic  witness  to 
His  triumph  wins  our  free  assent.  Wliat  would  be 
fantastic  if  asserted  of  another,  clearly  is  predicable  of 
Him.  But  a  principle  of  this  kind,  however  sound,  does 
not  cover  Herrmann's  position.^  In  point  of  fact,  belief 
in  the  resurrection  of  our  Lord  is  not  on  a  par  with 
various  doctrinal  affirmations  of  which  theology  avails 
itself  for  the  interpretation  of  Jesus  as  Mediator.  For 
the  resurrection  is  itself  part  of  the  revelation  to  be 
interpreted.  It  is  an  integral  element  in  the  whole 
presented  datum  in  which  the  love  of  God  has  become 
manifest  for  our  salvation.  Our  faith  stands  upon  the 
entire  fact  of  Christ  and  His  experience,  as  that  through 
which  God's  saving  power  has  been  revealed  and  made 
effective.  But  Jesus'  experience  did  not  end  in  death. 
It  embraced  resurrection  also,  and  this  can  be  ignored 
only  by  a  violent  effort  of  abstraction.  Eemove  the 
experience  of  Easter  morning,  therefore,  and  the  revelation 
of  God  to  which  we  are  called  to  respond  is  altered, 
because  the  quality  and  value  of  Jesus'  whole  career  is 
altered.  Something  great  has  been  withdrawn  from  the 
Pauline  climax :  "  It  is  Christ  that  died,  yea  rather  that 
was  raised  from  the  dead,  who  is  at  the  right  hand  of 
1  Cf.  Haring  and  Eeischle,  ZTK.  (1898),  129-133. 


THE    HISTORIC    CHRIST    A    RISEN    LORD  317 

God."  Diminish  the  revelation,  and  perforce  the  faith 
which  reacts  on  revelation  is  also  diminished.  A  Christ 
whom  we  know  to  have  been  raised  out  of  death,  and 
to  have  shown  Himself  to  His  disciples  as  the  Living 
One,  and  a  Christ  of  whom  we  are  not  quite  certain 
whether  He  is  risen  or  not,  are  obviously  so  different 
that  they  must  evoke  a  quite  different  religious  interest. 
If  our  view  of  God,  therefore,  is  to  be  fully  Christian,  if 
we  are  to  believe  in  Him  as  omnipotence  no  less  than  love, 
we  must  hold  that  the  resurrection  enters  vitally  into  the 
creative  ground  of  faith.  It  is  part  of  the  Gospel  in 
which  Jesus  is  held  forth.  Or,  to  put  it  otherwise,  the 
"  historic  Christ "  is  not  the  carpenter  of  Nazareth  merely, 
the  Hero  of  humanity,  the  ancient  religious  genius ;  He  is 
the  Lord  who  rose  again  to  the  glory  of  the  Father.^ 

To  sum  up,  then,  the  Christ  entitled  to  be  called 
historic  is  the  Christ  mediated  to  us  by  the  testimony  of 
apostles ;  so  mediated,  however,  that  in  their  witness  we 
are  able  to  perceive  and  know  Him  independently.  No 
line  of  demarcation  can  be  drawn  prohibiting  us,  in  our 
assertions  regarding  Him,  from  passing  beyond  the  hour 
of  His  crucifixion.  The  limits  within  which  Christ  is 
revealed  are  not  fixed  between  Bethlehem  and  Calvary. 
He  is  revealed  also  in  His  rising  from  the  dead.  Hence 
the  Fourth  Gospel  follows  a  true  and  irrepressible 
believing  instinct,  when  it  envisages  the  whole  earthly 
ministry  of  Jesus  as  already  charged  with  the  consummated 
significance  of  His  exaltation.  For  this  means  simply 
that  the  historic  Jesus  and  He  in  whom  faith  sees  the 
last  and  all-sufficient  manifestation  of  God  are  one  and 
the  same.  We  cannot  read  the  Gospels  and  not  feel  that 
this  Man  is  destined  for  resurrection ;  and  what  the 
writers  of  the  New  Testament  have  done  is  not  to  overlay 
the  concrete  facts  of  history  with  confusing  and  irrelevant 

^  Niebergall's  declaration  on  behalf  of  modern  radical  theology 
is  significant.  "We  need,"  he  says,  "something  else  which  will  serve 
as  well  as  the  old  doctrine  of  the  exalted  Christ"  {Hilligenhi,  34).  Has 
this  substitute  been  found  I 


318  THE    PERSON    OF   JESUS    CHRIST 

mythology,  but  with  profound  spiritual  insight  to  construe 
Jesus'  whole  career  in  the  light  of  its  stupendous  issue. 
There  has  never  been  a  Christianity  in  the  world  which 
did  not  worship  Christ  the  Lord  as  personally  identical 
with  Jesus  of  Nazareth.  A  criticism,  therefore,  which, 
after  repudiating  His  exaltation,  strives  to  disinter  the 
real  Jesus  from  the  mounds  of  untrustworthy  legend, 
is  reduced  for  lack  of  matter  to  constructions  of  a 
subjective  and  imaginary  character.  These  constructions 
proceed  on  lines  which  almost  by  definition  make  valid 
results  impossible ;  for,  resting  as  they  do  on  partially 
naturalistic  assumptions,  they  are  led  to  argue,  first,  that 
no  transcendent  Person  such  as  the  Christ  of  faith  could 
possibly  exist,  and  secondly,  that  even  if  He  did,  it  is 
inconceivable  that  a  subsequent  age  should  be  credibly 
informed  of  His  reality. 

But  if  the  earthly  Jesus  and  the  exalted  Lord  are 
one,  and  are  both  of  them  aspects  of  what  we  ought  to 
mean  by  "  the  historic  Christ,"  in  the  sense  that  the 
resurrection  is  part  of  the  historical  revelation  which 
evokes  faith,  this  implies  further  that  the  historic  Christ 
is  identical  also  with  the  Lord  present  in  experience  now 
and  always.  "  The  resurrection,"  it  has  been  put,  "  con- 
stitutes the  great  point  of  transition  in  the  Christian 
faith,  at  which  He  who  appeared  as  a  single  figure  in 
history  is  recognised  as  in  reality  above  historical  limita- 
tions, the  abiding  Lord  and  life  of  souls."  ^  In  every 
age  His  influence  has  continued  to  reconcile  men  with 
God.  And  these  effects  of  His  person,  in  touching  hearts 
and  changing  lives,  must  be  taken  account  of  in  our 
estimate  of  Himself,  for  the  capacity  to  do  these  things 
in  humanity  must  have  originally  been  resident  in  His 
being.  The  final  proof  of  the  Gospel,  indeed,  lies  in  the 
living  interrelation  and  correspondence  between  the  New 
Testament  picture  of  Christ  and  our  experience  of  His 
redeeming  energies.  Now  as  then.  He  convinces  men  of 
sin    yet    assures     them    of     forgiveness,    judges    them    in 

^  Forrest,  Christ  of  History  and  of  Ex^erieTice,  158. 


HISTORY    AND    EXPERIENCE  319 

righteousness  yet  restores  their  soul ;  and  this  in  virtue 
of  a  personality  uniquely  and  inseparably  one  with  God. 
If  the  pictured  Christ  be  the  die,  the  impression  within 
the  Christian  consciousness  answers  to  it  part  for  part. 
Both  reveal  the  actual  Jesus.  As  He  imprinted  Himself 
on  the  disciples'  mind,  He  imprints  Himself  to-day  on 
ours ;  and  in  both  cases  harmonious  effects  flow  from  a 
single  real  cause.  The  transcendent  Christ,  active  "  all 
the  days  unto  the  end,"  guarantees  the  Jesus  of  Palestine, 
for  ever  anew  He  grants  to  men  the  very  experiences 
undergone  by  the  primitive  group  of  believers. 

It  is  therefore  a  principle  of  cardinal  importance 
that  Christology,  at  each  point,  should  be  animated  and 
controlled  by  what  we  know  of  the  historic  Christ ;  but, 
like  other  excellent  principles,  it  must  not  be  applied  in 
any  narrow  or  legalistic  spirit.  Without  this  constant 
reference  to  fact,  this  instinctive  recurrence  to  the  self- 
consciousness  of  Jesus  and  the  impression  made  by  Him 
on  the  first  Christians,  we  launch  ourselves  upon  the 
wide  uncharted  sea  of  mysticism.  But  it  does  not 
follow  that  every  doctrinal  statement  about  Jesus  must 
be  sanctioned  verbally  by  a  word  from  His  lips  or  by  a 
distinct  apostolic  utterance.  What  is  required  rather  is 
that  the  New  Testament  picture  as  a  whole  should  be 
truthfully  reflected  in  our  construction  as  a  whole.  Let 
the  portrait  of  the  historic  Christ,  contained  in  primitive 
testimony,  be  brought  to  bear  directly  upon  our  mind, 
saturating  it  through  and  through  ;  and  thereupon  let  us 
proceed  to  give  free  systematised  expression  to  the  thoughts 
which  arise  within  us.  This  is,  as  a  fact,  what  has 
happened  whenever  theologians  have  spoken  worthily  of 
Jesus  Christ,  and  it  is  clearly  the  procedure  which  har- 
monises with  the  native  freedom  of  the  Gospel.  And  if 
it  be  said  that  this  appears  to  commit  the  Church  to  the 
vagaries  of  individual  feeling,  and  the  cry  be  raised  for 
some  inflexible  rule  by  which  to  measure  the  correctness 
of  opinions,  it  must  be  replied  that  no  legal  guarantee  for 
unchanging  orthodoxy  can  be  given.     Nothing  in  Chris- 


320  THE    PERSON    OF   JESUS    CHRIST 

tianity,  let  us  be  thankful,  can  be  guaranteed  in  that  way. 
But  there  are  better  sureties  within  our  reach.  We  have 
the  promise  of  the  Spirit,  to  lead  the  Church  into  all 
truth ;  we  have  the  Word  of  God,  which  liveth  and  abideth 
for  ever,  and  to  which  the  Spirit  bears  witness  perpetually 
in  the  hearts  of  men.  These  are  the  real — these,  when 
we  speak  strictly,  are  the  only  and  the  sufficient — guaran- 
tees that  the  mind  of  the  believer,  working  freely  on  its  data, 
will  reach  conclusions  that  are  in  line  with  the  great  faith 
of  the  past.  Wherever  sincere  thinkers  are  impressed 
by  Christ  as  those  were  impressed  who  gathered  round 
Him  at  the  beginning,  there  the  truth  will  be. 


CHAPTER   III. 

CHRIST'S  PERSON  IN  RELATION  TO  HIS  WORK. 

It  is  a  feature  of  the  best  modern  Christology  that  the 
person  of  our  Lord  has  come  to  be  exhibited  as  inter- 
pretable  only  through  the  medium  of  His  redeeming  work. 
There  is  an  all  but  universal  feeling  that  to  know  what 
He  has  done  and  does  will  reveal  to  us  what  He  is. 
Nature  is  relative  to  function ;  the  work,  as  philosophers 
say,  is  the  ratio  cojnoscendi  of  the  Worker.  In  a  former 
chapter  Schleiermacher  was  found  to  be  the  pioneer  of  this 
inductive  method,  but  it  goes  back  really  to  Luther,  whose 
words  are  very  strong.  "  Christ,"  he  says,  "  is  not  called 
Christ  because  He  has  two  natures.  What  does  that  signify 
to  me  ?  He  bears  this  glorious  and  consoling  name  because 
of  the  office  and  the  work  He  has  undertaken."^  A 
kindred  spirit,  Athanasius,  had  used  it  long  before,  speak- 
ing in  the  de  Incarnatione  of  an  inquirer  who  "  sees  Christ's 
power  through  His  works  to  be  incomparable  with  that  of 
men,  and  comes  to  know  that  He  alone  among  men  is  God 
the  Word."  ^  The  forms  in  which  this  principle  of  regress 
from  work  to  person  may  be  applied  we  shall  examine 
presently ;  here  it  is  enough  to  note  how  essential  and 
convincing  it  is  to  study  the  Eedeemer  not  it  priori  but 

Literature — Kahler,  Das  Kreuz,  Grund  und  Mass  der  Uhristologie, 
1911  ;  Gore,  Bampton  Lectures,  1891  ;  Frommel,  Mudes  morales  et  re- 
lirjieuses,  1907  ;  Haering,  Der  chriHtliche  Glauhc,  1906  ;  Wendt,  System  der 
christliclicn  Lehre,  1907 ;  Denney,  Death  of  Christ,  1902  ;  Garvie,  The 
Ritschlian  Theology,  1899  ;  J.  Drumniond,  Studies  in  Christian  Doctrine, 
1908  ;  Walker,  The  Spirit  and  the  Incarnation^,  1901  ;  Cairns,  Christianity 
and  the  Modern  World,  1906. 

^  Werkc  (Erlangen  ed.)  xii.  244.  *  c.  45  (Bindley's  trans.). 

21 


322  THE    PERSON    OF   JESUS    CHRIST 

in  the  medium  of  redemption,  of  which  as  believers  we 
have  direct  or  experimental  knowledge.  To  pass  on  from 
first-hand  data  to  more  remote  inductions  and  hypotheses, 
from  fact  to  explanatory  theory,  is  the  method  of  all  sound 
investigation.  Not  that  we  are  limited  to  this  mode  of 
thought.  On  the  contrary,  when  we  have  reached  an 
hypothesis,  we  go  on  to  test  it  in  a  new  way  by  inquiring 
how  it  serves  for  the  inverse  process  of  deduction.  Hence 
we  shall  find  that  Christ's  person  casts  light  on  His  work 
as  well  as  gains  light  from  it. 

The  mutual  bearing  of  person  and  work  is  strikingly 
illustrated  by  the  main  drift   of  Christology  in  its  great 
historic    phases.^      An  intimate  connection  has  existed  at 
each    point    between    conceptions     of     our    Lord's    saving 
influence  and  His  intrinsic  being.     Take  first  the  Greek 
view  of  redemption.     It  was  felt  in  the   East  that  man 
needs  primarily  to  be  saved  from  that  radical  corruption 
which  may  be  summarily  described  as  "  death."      Sin  has 
enslaved  us  to  decay.      Death,  then,  is  the  great  evil ;  the 
loss  of  fellowship  with  God,  though  deeply  realised,  is  of 
second-rank  importance  at  this  point.      Athanasius'  words 
about  sin  are  fairly  typical :  "  If  indeed  it  had  only  been  a 
trespass,  and  not  a  consequent  corruption,  repentance  would 
be  well   enough."  2     But,  as    he    proceeds    to   argue,  cor- 
ruption necessitated  the  more  thorough  cure  of  incarnation. 
This  fixed  the  outline  of  Christology.      Salvation  is  to  be 
freed  from  death  and  decay  ;  the  Saviour,  accordingly,  was 
conceived    as  the    ineffable    and  transcendent  mystery  in 
which  immortal  deity  is  combined   with   mortal   manhood, 
the  whole  lump  of  humanity  being  thus  leavened  with  the 
impassible  and  uncorruptible  powers  of  Godhead  and  raised 
into  what  appears  to  have  been  thought  of  as  a  physical  or 
semi-physical  union  with  the  Divine.      Man  universal    is 
deified  in   Christ  by  the  living  amalgamation  in  Him  of 
human  nature    and    the    eternal  Logos.       Doubtless    this 
irradiation    of    humanity    is    fully    manifest    only    in    the 
resurrection  and  ascension  of   the  Incarnate  One,  but   in 
'  Cf.  Haering,  op.  cit.  374  f.  ^  de  Incarn.  7. 


GREEK    CONCEPTIONS    OF   THE   SAVIOUR  323 

principle  it  is  real  from  the  fust  moment  at  which  the 
Word  took  flesh.  No  doubt  also  the  Incarnate  is  the 
object  of  faith ;  yet  this  faith,  in  its  turn,  is  likewise  con- 
ceived as  a  mysterious  participation  in  His  secret  Divine 
nature,  conveyed  most  characteristically  in  the  sacra- 
ments, which  act  for  the  most  part  in  non-moral  ways. 
Thus  the  Eedeemership  of  Christ  is  expressed  in  cate- 
gories which  could  have  only  a  temporary  sway.  It  is 
set  forth  in  terms  more  than  half  corporeal;  salvation  has 
at  times  the  look  almost  of  a  substance  which  it  is  possible 
to  assimilate  physically.  Christ  Himself  is  an  incompre- 
hensible mystery  in  whom  the  indefinable  essence  of  Deity 
is  combined  with  that  of  manhood,  and  the  mystery  so 
indicated  lies  rather  below  than  above  what  we  know  as 
ethical  and  personal  realities. 

Of  course  this  is  not  the  whole  triith  about  the  Greek 
Christology,^  but  it  is  a  real  and  influential  part  of  the 
truth.  And  it  exemplifies  the  maxim  that  conceptions  of 
Christ's  work  and  of  Himself  vary  together.  If  what  He 
does  upon  us  is  to  effect  a  quasi-physical  change  in  our 
essential  manhood — primarily  in  the  essence  of  humanity 
as  such,  a  real  universal  in  which  we  participate — we  are 
naturally  led  to  define  His  person  in  terms  of  substance, 
not  spirit.  For  reasons  which  are  both  religious  and 
psychological  or  philosophical,  this  is  out  of  touch  with 
the  modern  mind.  But  we  are  in  accord  with  these  great 
thinkers  in  the  fundamental  conviction  which  inspired  them. 
We  also  believe  that  the  dynamic  power  of  Christ  is 
operative  in  the  organic  life  of  mankind,  and  that  He 
interposed  in  loving  power  to  regenerate  by  Himself 
descending  into  the  bosom  of  humanity  as  a  redemptive 
force. 

Take  now  the  Christology  of  the  West.  As  St. 
Augustine  lays  bare  his  soul  before  God,  what  we  see  is 
chiefly  an  impassioned  longing  for  righteousness,  for 
deliverance  from  the  guilt  of  sin.     To  be  saved  is  to  be 

'  The  [place  of  kuowledge  [i.e.  a  truly  spiritual  element)  in  the  Greek 
view  of  salvation  must  not  be  overlooked. 


324  THE   PERSON   OF   JESUS    CHRIST 

made  righteous ;  and  the  mode  of  salvation  consists  in  the 
secret  infusion  of  supernatural  grace,  bestowing  power  to 
do  meritorious  works.  There  is  an  influx  of  grace  as 
charity  whereby  men  are  enabled  to  deserve  higher  grace. 
This  determines  the  thought  of  Christ.  He  is  not  merely 
as  God-man  the  ineffable  mystery  the  East  had  found 
Him ;  in  His  Divine  humanity  He  makes  full  satisfac- 
tion for  the  infinite  sin  of  man.  To  the  Western  mind 
religion  is  in  large  measure  a  thing  of  law,  and  Christ 
a  legal  person.  Having  purchased  forgiveness  by  His 
passion  and  obedience.  He  is  perpetually  operative  within 
His  Church — defined  as  the  institute  of  grace — above  all 
in  the  mass  and  the  sacrament  of  penance,  which  distribute 
the  energies  of  His  Divine  life.  As  the  source  of  life  He 
is  indeed  object  of  faith,  but  here  also  faith  has  lost  its 
New  Testament  significance.  It  is  now  become  the  accept- 
ance of  Church  dogma  and  of  religious  precepts.  Hence 
if  in  Greek  thought  the  person  of  our  Lord  had  been 
interpreted  by  predominantly  physical  conceptions,  the 
Western  terms  are  rather  those  of  jurisprudence ;  and 
when  Latin  theology  took  its  most  characteristic  form, 
unmodified  by  the  deeper  motives  of  religion,  the  living 
personality  of  the  historic  Christ  was  apt  to  vanish  in  the 
rigid  and  mechanical  actings  of  a  non-human  lay-figure.^ 

In  this  case  also  the  conceptions  of  what  Christ  has 
done  and  of  what  He  is  are  correlative.  His  work  is 
that  of  a  legal  intermediary,  and  it  fixes  the  constitution 
of  His  person.  A  dualistic  combination  of  deity  and 
humanity  sufficed.  Anselm  puts  it  frankly.  "  To  this 
end,"  he  writes,  "  was  efficacious  the  diversity  of  natures 
and  unity  of  person  in  Christ,  that  if  human  nature  were 
not  able  to  do  what  must  needs  be  done  for  the  restoration 
of  mankind,  the  Divine  nature  might  do  it ;  and  if  it  were 

^  In  one  point  of  view  Western  writers  did  much  to  sustain  a  sense  of 
our  Lord's  true  manhood.  Their  profounder  grasp  of  the  atonement  implied 
an  Atoner  who,  as  a  real  ethical  subject,  was  capable  of  accepting  vast 
responsibilities.  Thus  if  in  the  traditional  Christology  His  manhood 
ranked  as  impersonal,  its  full  personality  was  virtually  assumed  in  the 
doctrine  of  His  saving  work. 


THE    LATINS    AND    THE    REFORMERS  325 

hardly   suitable  to  the  Diviue  nature,  the  human  might 
effect  it."  1 

Finally,  the  Eeformers  gave  back  to  the  Christian 
thought  of  salvation  its  properly  religious  tone.  If  in 
the  East  the  categories  had  been  too  much  formed  on 
a  physical  analogy,  and  in  the  West  on  the  procedure 
of  the  law-court,  for  Luther  and  Calvin  redemption  once 
more  became  simply  personal — a  relation,  historically 
mediated,  between  God  and  the  soul.  God  is  Holy  Love, 
and  salvation  is  fellowship  with  Him.  It  rests  on  the 
forgiveness  of  sins,  it  is  appropriated  by  faith  as  grateful 
self-surrender  to  an  infinite  object.  And  Christ  is  con- 
ceived in  forms  suitable  to  and  worthy  of  this  function. 
He  is  the  Eevealer  of  God ;  He  is  man's  Surety  and 
Eepresentative.  In  Him  the  eternal  Divine  truth  and 
love  touch  us ;  in  Him  we  are  led  to  the  father ;  and 
these  two  sides  of  the  relationship — God  in  Him  for  us, 
we  in  Him  for  God — at  each  point  condition  and  harmonise 
with  one  another.  Thus  the  great  problem  re-appears  in 
spiral  fashion  one  stage  higher — How  must  we  think  of 
His  intrinsic  nature  in  the  light  of  this  new  conception  of 
His  work  ?  Who  is  Christ,  if  He  thus  embodies  to  sinful 
men  the  redeeming  grace  of  the  Eternal  ?  There  is  one 
principle,  then,  countersigned  by  history,  which  is  funda- 
mental to  all  profitable  debate.  It  is  the  principle  that 
our  thought  of  what  Christ  has  achieved  will  fix  and 
delimit  that  which  we  can  know  of  Himself.  As  the 
redemption  is,  so  by  necessity  is  the  Kedeemer. 

This  general  truth  has  been  or  may  be  developed  in 
various  related  ways.  We  may  single  out  these  four  con- 
ceptions as  ofiering  us  the  best  sort  of  inductive  guidance 
when  we  try  to  clear  up  our  minds  regarding  the  person 
and  place  of  Jesus — (1)  ethical  supremacy,  (2)  atonement, 
(3)  union  with  Christ,  (4)  revelation.  Contemplating  these 
central  matters  we  find  that  Christ's  work  is  such  as  to 
lead  our  thoughts  spontaneously  in  the  direction  of  a  quite 
^  Cur  Deus  Homo,  ii.  18. 


326  THE    PERSON    OF   JESUS    CHRIST 

distinct  view  of  His  position.  His  work  is  but  His  person 
in  movement.^ 

(1)  Christ  is  the  supreme  moral  authority  of  human 
life.  He  inspires  a  new  ideal  of  character  and  conduct, 
which  it  has  been  found  impossible  to  realise  except  by 
His  aid.  We  are  not  now  concerned  with  the  ways  in 
which  this  influence  is  mediated,  but  solely  with  the 
fact  itself,  its  harmony  with  Christ's  own  mind,  and  its 
implications  for  Christology. 

As  regards  our  Lord's  mind,  it  is  obvious  that  He 
asked  from  men  a  personal  obedience  more  absolute 
than  normal  man  may  ask  from  his  fellows.  It  was  an 
obedience  covering  the  entire  field  of  human  life.  The 
persuasion  of  men  to  trust  Him  was  His  one  chief 
aim.  On  loyalty  to  Himself  He  insisted  in  a  manner 
resembling  the  jealousy  of  God  in  the  Old  Testament. 
It  is  impossible  to  add  anything  to  the  words :  "  If  any 
man  come  to  Me,  and  hate  not  his  own  father,  and 
mother,  and  wife,  and  children,  and  brethren,  and  sisters, 
yea,  and  his  own  life  also,  he  cannot  be  My  disciple."^ 
To  the  ancestral  code  of  Judaism  His  attitude  is  one  of 
sovereign  liberty ;  by  the  inherent  right  of  the  legislator 
He  cancels  the  past  and  enacts  new  ordinances  for  His 
kingdom.  When  announcing  these  higher  laws  He  makes 
no  appeal  to  Divine  sanctions.  To  His  own  conscious- 
ness He  is  the  representative  of  the  Father,  privy  always 
to  His  purpose  in  all  its  scope  and  able  to  declare  His 
mind  as  the  Son  to  whom  all  things  are  delivered.  His 
verdict  on  great  life-issues  is  uttered  in  a  tone  of  complete 
finality.  Whether  it  be  the  character  of  an  individual, 
or  seeming  conflicts  of  duty,  or  the  call  for  renunciation, 
or  fitness  to  receive  pardon,  the  truth  lies  clear  before 
Him.  He  reviews,  condemns,  forgives,  commends,  enjoins, 
with  a  decision  from  which  there  is  no  appeal.  Never  do 
we   read  of  His  solving   an  intellectual    problem,  but  at 

*  With  a  true  instinct,  early  religious  art  invariably  represents  Jesus 
as  acting. 
2  Lk  1428. 


THE    MORAL    AUTHORITY    OF    JESUS  327 

each  step  He  disposed  of  questions  greater  by  far.  That 
He  took  this  place  inteiitiniially,  with  the  consciousness  of 
being  called  to  a  unique  task  and  of  possessing  for  it 
unique  powers,  is  evidenced  by  His  stupendous  claim  to  be 
the  final  Judge  of  the  world.  This  assertion  He  made 
unequivocally,  and  from  the  Epistles  we  can  see  that  it 
was  never  forgotten.  In  principle  it  was  of  course  not 
new ;  for  by  assuming  the  right  to  forgive  sin  Jesus 
professed  to  fix  the  destinies  of  men ;  yet  at  least  there 
was  affirmed  a  new  universality  and  timelessness  of  moral 
jurisdiction.  In  His  own  mind,  therefore,  Jesus'  authority 
over  mankind  is  not  merely  absolute  in  the  sense  that  it  is 
valid  eternally ;  it  is  valid  in  the  sense  that  it  goes  down 
to  the  depths  of  personality  and  represents  the  last  verdict 
of  Love  and  Holiness  on  all  that  we  have  been. 

On  the  other  hand,  this  astounding  claim — not  usurped 
or  snatched  at,  as  we  have  seen,  but  simply  presupposed — 
has  been  acknowledged  by  all  Christian  believers.  In 
every  age  those  who  call  Jesus  Lord  have  rejoiced  that 
He  should  exercise  an  unshared  control  over  life  and 
conduct.  Whether  we  can  or  cannot  explain  it — and 
the  thing  may  be  as  ultimate  as  the  consciousness  of  right 
and  wrong — they  are  somehow  made  aware  that  He  is 
highest  in  the  moral  sphere ;  that  is,  not  merely  that 
His  precepts  are  unsurpassed  in  powder  and  clarity,  or  that 
His  own  life  is  their  perfect  illustration,  but  that  He 
confronts  us  as  One  who  is  on  the  throne  of  conscience, 
who  has  a  right  to  interfere  with  us,  and  through  sub- 
mission to  whom  alone  we  obtain  victory  in  the  moral 
strife.  The  right  of  Jesus  to  rule  has  been  often  canvassed  ; 
its  limits  have  been  sought  for ;  the  terms  in  which  it  is 
to  be  defined  have  been  keenly  scrutinised  :  but  for  the 
Christian  it  is  still  true  that  the  moral  supremacy  of 
Christ,  in  its  majestic  gravity,  covers  the  length  and 
breadth  and  depth  and  height  of  human  experience,  and 
subjection  to  it  is  not  a  question  of  less  or  more,  but  a 
question  of  life  and  death.  "  As  the  result  of  growing 
familiarity  with  our  Lord,"  it  has  been  said,  "conscience 


328  THE   PERSON   OF   JESUS    CHRIST 

becomes  surer  of  Him  than  of  itself ;  finds  in  His  will  the 
same  awful  obligation  that  it  finds  in  the  law  of  Duty  ; 
His  will,  because  it  is  His,  whenever  we  are  certain  that 
we  know  it,  is  supreme."  ^ 

Now  the  fact  of  Christ's  overwhelming  authority, 
which  it  thus  is  freedom  to  obey,  is  a  fact  calling  for 
interpretation.  For  it  is  not  only  that  we  cannot  conceive 
a  limit  to  His  authority ;  by  degrees  it  becomes  clear  to  us 
that  there  is  no  limit.  We  search  in  vain  for  an  exception 
to  the  rule  that  His  will  represents  the  highest  form  of 
obligation.  It  is  a  remark  of  Mr.  A.  C.  Bradley  that  "  we 
cannot  apprehend  an  object  as  sublime  while  we  apprehend 
it  as  comparably,  measurably,  or  finitely  great.  Let  the 
thing  be  what  it  may — physical,  vital,  or  spiritual — the 
moment  we  say  to  ourselves,  "  It  is  very  great,  but  I  know 
how  great,"  or  "  It  is  very  great,  but  something  else  is  as 
great  or  greater,"  at  that  moment  it  has  ceased  to  be 
sublime."  2  This  unmeasured  greatness,  this  sublimity, 
pertains  to  Jesus  as  our  Lord.  His  power  to  rule  passes 
understanding.  And  our  feeling  of  this  is  strikingly 
confirmed  by  its  antagonism  to  immediate  impulse.  When 
the  authority  of  Jesus  first  breaks  upon  a  man,  he  is 
conscious  of  a  certain  suspense  or  hesitation ;  there  is 
a  sense  of  being  checked,  or  baffled,  or  even  stupefied,  or 
possibly  even  repelled  or  menaced,  as  though  something 
were  affecting  him  that  he  could  not  receive,  or  grasp,  or 
stand  up  to.  But  once  he  has  ceased  to  feel  that  his 
personality  is  being  invaded,  there  succeeds,  at  a  long  or 
short  interval  and  with  mounting  gradations  of  intensity, 
a  sense  of  being  borne  out  of  himself  and  carried  away 
into  the  dominion  of  very  Goodness,  with  an  adoring 
homage  which  is  more  than  strongly  tinged  with  awe  and 
self-abasement.  No  man  has  ever  complained  that  Jesus' 
will  misled  him,  or  deprived  him  of  that  which  is,  in  the 
absolute  sense,  good. 

Furthernjore,  it  is  from  Christ  that  we  receive  that 

^  Dale,  Christian  Doctrine,  110. 
'  Oxford  Lectures  on  Poetry,  60. 


THE    MORAL   AUTHORITY    OF   JESUS  329 

moral  dynamic  and  inspiration  in  the  absence  of  which 
His  message  would  lead  us  to  despair.  Along  with  the 
call  to  obedience  goes  the  power  to  obey.  Life's  moral 
resources  are  in  Him.  This  is  an  experiential  truth 
against  which  the  protest  of  this  or  that  man  that  he 
does  not  have  any  such  experience  has  no  cogency.  IMen 
do  pass  out  of  themselves  to  make  the  will  of  Christ 
theirs  and  their  will  His  ;  having  died  with  Him  they 
also  live  with  Him.  In  Him  they  shaie  the  relationship 
of  sons  of  God,  and  are  supported  in  the  struggle  with 
self  and  evil  by  His  sympathy  and  communion.  They 
share,  they  really  share,  His  conflict  and  His  triumph. 

As  I  have  said,  these  are  plain  facts  calling  for 
explanation  and  synthesis.  We  are  faced  by  One  whose 
moral  authority  is  infinite  as  God's  is  infinite ;  yet  it  is  a 
completely  human  person  whom  we  see.  No  view  of 
Christ,  it  follows,  will  be  adequate  which  is  blind  to 
this  complete  manhood  as  mediating  a  more  than  human 
transcendence.  By  this  handle,  indeed,  the  modern  miud 
in  most  cases  first  lays  hold  of  the  Godhead  of  Christ. 
His  assertion — the  more  deliberate  because  often  it  is 
unuttered — of  His  own  complete  fulfilment  of  the  Father's 
will,  and  of  His  consequent  authority  over  men,  is  either 
the  acme  of  self-righteousness,  or  it  is  the  self-revealing 
speech  of  the  Son  of  God.  But  to  say  this  is  to  interpret 
Jesus'  person  by  His  work. 

(2)  The  atoning  work  performed  by  Christ  is  also 
a  decisive  index  of  His  person.  Of  this  principle  Dr. 
Denney  has  given  a  brief  elucidation  in  his  Death  of  Christ} 
arguing  that  the  doctrine  of  atonement  is  the  proper 
evangelical  foundation  of  Christology.  "  To  put  it  in  the 
shortest  form  possible,"  he  writes,  "  Christ  is  the  Person 
who  can  do  this  work  for  us.  This  is  the  deepest  and 
most  decisive  thing  we  can  know  about  Him,  and  in 
answering  the  questions  which  it  prompts  we  are  starting 
from  a  basis  in   experience.     There  is  a  sense  in   which 

J3l7fF. 


330  THE    PERSON    OF   JESUS    CHRIST 

Christ  as  the  Eecouciler  confronts  us.  .He  is  doing  the 
will  of  God  on  our  behalf,  and  we  can  only  look  on.  It 
is  the  mercy  of  God  in  relation  to  our  sins  which  we  see  in 
Him,  and  His  presence  and  work  on  earth  are  a  Divine  gift, 
a  Divine  visitation.  He  is  the  gift  of  God  to  men,  not  the 
offering  of  men  to  God,  and  God  gives  Himself  to  us  in  and 
with  Him.  We  owe  to  Him  all  that  we  call  Divine  life. 
On  the  other  hand,  this  Divine  visitation  is  made,  and  this 
Divine  life  is  imparted,  through  a  life  and  work  which 
are  truly  human.  The  presence  and  work  of  Jesus  in  the 
world,  even  the  work  of  bearing  sin,  does  not  prompt  us 
to  define  human  and  Divine  by  contrast  with  each  other : 
there  is  no  suggestion  of  incongruity  between  them. 
Nevertheless,  they  are  both  there,  and  the  fact  that  they 
are  both  there  justifies  us  in  raising  the  question  as  to 
Jesus'  relation  to  God  on  the  one  hand,  and  to  men  on 
the  other.  ...  It  is  the  doctrine  of  the  Atonement  which 
secures  for  Christ  His  place  in  the  gospel,  and  which 
makes  it  inevitable  that  we  should  have  a  Christology  or 
a  doctrine  of  His  Person.  .  .  .  The  Atonement  always 
says  to  us  again,  Consider  how  great  this  Man  was !  As 
long  as  it  holds  its  place  in  the  preaching  of  the  gospel, 
and  asserts  itself  in  the  Church,  as  it  does  in  the  New 
Testament,  as  the  supreme  inspiration  to  praise,  so  long 
will  Christians  find  in  the  Person  of  their  Lord  a  subject 
of  high  and  reverent  thought." 

To  this  nothing  can  be  added  in  point  of  cogency,  but 
it  may  reward  us  to  dwell  for  a  moment  on  certain  of  its 
implications.  Thus,  the  Christian  is  intuitively  aware 
that  the  vicarious  love  revealed  in  Jesus'  cross  is  the  love 
of  God}  It  is  He  that  in  Christ  gives  us  "  rest  by  His 
sorrow  and  life  by  His  death."  It  is  He  that  stands 
beside  us  and  receives  our  trespass,  in  its  awful  gravity 
for  His  mind  and  ours,  upon  Himself.  Unless  this  were 
so,  unless  the  passion  to  which  we  lift  our  eyes  at  Calvary 
were  a  Divine  passion,  through  which  we  have  sight  of  a 

^  Cf.  for  a  speculative  but  deeply  impressive  statement  of  this,  Nettleship, 
Philosoj^ihical  Eemains,  40-42. 


HIS    WORK    OF    ATONEMENT  331 

nrief  that  troubles  evcu  the  Eternal  Blessedness,  it  would 
simply  mean  nothing  for  religion.  It  could  not  affect  the 
relation  of  man  to  God.  On  the  other  hand,  just  because 
as  we  confront  Jesus,  living  and  dying,  we  beconie  conscious 
of  the  Divine  sacrifice  poured  forth  in  Him,  we  are 
irresistibly  impelled  to  form  one  view  of  His  person 
rather  than  another.  Sometliing  of  the  pathos  and 
sublimity  of  that  word  stirs  and  subdues  the  mind :  "  He 
that  spared  not  His  own  Son,  but  delivered  Him  up  for 
us  all."  Narrow  and  poor  as  human  terms  are,  we  must 
needs  employ  them  to  formulate  the  certainty  of  faith  that 
in  the  sufferings  of  Christ  for  our  sake  God  suffered ;  that 
for  us  the  Father  hid  His  face  from  the  Son,  withdrew 
His  hand,  permitted  the  desolation,  left  Him  to  His  foes. 
The  impression  we  receive  at  the  cross  is  unintelligible 
save  as  in  Jesus  we  behold  very  God  "  in  loving  communion 
with  our  misery." 

Again,  the  condemnation  of  sin  visible  in  the  life  and 
death  of  Jesus  is  a  condemnation  uttered  by  God  Himself. 
Not  by  a  divinely  commissioned  prophet  only,  or  other 
inspired  deputy,  but  by  God.  We  have  a  living  sense 
of  this  as  we  are  face  to  face  with  Jesus.  There  looks 
on  us  from  His  eyes  the  holiness  with  which  evil  cannot 
dwell.  Never  was  sin  so  exposed,  and,  by  exposure, 
reprobated,  doomed,  and  sentenced  as  by  our  Lord's 
demeanour.  In  His  dealings  with  the  sinful,  and  with  the 
consequences  of  sin,  this  Man  is  one  with  God  ;  and  what 
awes  the  beholder  in  the  cross  is  not  the  meeting  of  sin 
and  a  good  man,  but  the  meeting  of  sin  with  the  Eternal. 
If  as  true  man  Christ  felt  the  horror  and  curse  of  moral 
evil,  He  also  in  unity  with  God  felt  and  judged  its  guilt. 
And  if,  in  spite  of  that  judgment  and  condemnation.  He 
goes  to  death  for  sinners,  He  thereby  exemplifies  in  a 
supreme  measure  the  moral  truth  that  only  He  can  forgive 
sin  who  expiates  it.  This  judgment,  then,  of  which  Jesus 
is  the  personal  manifestation,  is  a  Divine  judgment ;  at 
the  same  time,  it  is  pronounced  through  the  medium  of 
perfect    manhood.      It    comes    from  the  lips  of    one  who 


332  THE    PERSON   OF   JESUS    CHRIST 

Himself  had  battled  with  temptation  and  had  conquered 
in  the  power  of  God. 

Once  more,  the  atonement  raises  great  Christological 
questions  by  forcing  us  to  ask  how  the  obedience  of 
Jesus  avails  for  us,  the  guilty.  It  has  always  been  a 
baffling  problem :  How  can  the  suffering  of  one  person 
benefit,  or  savingly  embrace  and  comprehend,  any  other  ? 
In  the  words  of  Moberly :  "  How  is  it  conceivable  (the 
mind  asks)  that  any  Eedeemer's  work,  or  endurance,  or 
goodness,  be  it  what  it  may,  seeing  that  it  is  outside  the 
personalities  of  men,  should  touch  the  point  of  pressing 
necessity  ?  "  ^  To  deal  with  this  question  fully  we  should 
have  to  anticipate  the  argument  summarised  under  (3),  but 
here  it  may  at  least  be  said  that  if  Jesus  Christ  were  one 
more  human  individual  merely,  as  separate  from  men  as 
we  are  from  our  fellows,  the  difficulty  just  noted  would 
be  insoluble,  alike  in  logic  and  in  morality.  But  if  with 
St.  Paul  and  St.  John  we  decline  to  conceive  Christ  as 
one  isolated  person,  and  the  Christian  as  another,  then 
the  representative  act  of  sacrifice  on  His  part  is  quite 
another  thing,  and  the  death  that  He  died  for  all  may 
have  the  significance  which  the  death  of  all  would  itself 
have.  Union  between  Christ  and  men,  that  is,  just 
because  it  is  a  union,  has  two  sides.  His  self-identification 
with  us  implies  consequences  both  for  Him  and  us.  As 
the  representative  or  central  person — none  the  less  truly 
individual,  as  we  shall  see — He  stands  in  a  momentous 
kinship  to  men ;  and  this  universality  of  relation  forms 
one  vital  condition  of  His  power  to  make  atonement.  It 
is  surely  the  false  step  in  many  theories  of  atonement  that 
they  first  abstract  the  Christian  from  Christ — severing 
them  as  two  mutually  impervious  personalities — and  then 
find  it  hard,  naturally,  to  put  them  back  into  such  a 
oneness  that  what  Christ  did  and  is  fundamentally 
modifies  our  relation  to  God.  But  if  by  its  very  nature 
all  Christian  theology  is  an  interpretation  of  believing 
experience  from  within,  this  oneness  with  Christ,  of  which 
'  Atonement  and  Personality,  74. 


HIS   WORK    OF    ATONEMENT  833 

we  are  conscious,  is  our  pundum  stans ;  and  the  attempt 
to  put  it  even  tempoiaiily  in  abeyance  must  be  ruled  out 
as  illegitimate.  We  do  not  have  to  prove  it,  or  make  a 
doctrine  of  atonement  apart  from  it ;  we  assume  it,  rather, 
and  seek  to  elucidate  its  deepest  implications.  And  for 
our  present  purpose  the  relevant  inference  is  that  this 
absolute  capacity  whereby  Christ  gathers  men  into 
Himself  and  in  their  name,  and  for  them,  makes 
response  to  the  Divine  righteousness  condemning  sin,  is 
something  which,  if  we  regard  it  closely,  makes  humanitarian 
conceptions  of  His  being  totally  inadequate. 

Not  only  so ;  it  is  precisely  as  we  recognise  the  true 
Godhead  of  Christ  that  we  are  able  to  repel  successfully  one 
of  the  gravest  moral  difficulties  which  the  doctrine  of  atone- 
ment has  created.  This  is  the  difficulty  men  feel  when 
they  point  to  the  impossible  ideas  of  "  an  enraged  Father,  a 
victimised  Son,  the  unrighteous  punishment  of  the  innocent, 
the  unrighteous  reward  of  the  guilty."  As  against  certain 
forms  of  theory  we  need  not  question  the  justice  of  the 
charge.  But  it  is  at  least  obvious  that  the  mistake  of 
suggesting  a  kind  of  antagonism  between  the  Father  and 
the  Son  attaches  more  naturally  to  a  view  of  Christ  which 
denies,  than  to  one  which  asserts,  His  deity.  If  Christ 
were  but  one  more  good  man,  there  might  be  reason  in 
the  argument  that  redeeming  love  originated  in  man,  not 
in  God,  and  that  by  the  urgency  and  passion  of  His 
sacrifice  Christ  had  induced  an  otherwise  implacable  God 
to  show  mercy.  But  this  antagonism  we  cannot  suspect 
if  we  are  sure  that  in  Christ  God  Himself  has  bowed 
down  to  bless  us.  If  the  required  atonement  has  been 
provided  by  God,  out  of  His  own  life,  it  is  meaningless  to 
speak  any  more  of  His  implacability. 

(3)  Light  is  cast  on  our  Lord's  person,  thirdly,  by  the 
Christian  experience  of  vital  union  with  Christ.^  This 
unio   mystica,   I  need   hardly  say,   is   not   meant   here   as 

'On  what  follows  cf.  the  present  writer's  article,  "The  Unio  Mystica 
as  a  Theological  Conception,"  Expositor,  February  1909. 


334  THE   PERSON    OF   JESUS    CHRIST 

implying  what  older  writers  were  accustomed  to  describe 
as'  a  union  of  the  "  substance "  of  Christ  and  the 
"  substance "  of  believers.  Men  of  to-day  rightly  reject 
any  such  view.  But  in  agreeing  with  them,  we  do  well  to 
remind  ourselves  that  substance  was  simply  the  category 
by  which  earlier  thinkers  strove  to  affirm  the  highest 
conceivable  degree  of  reality ;  it  was  indeed  their  loftiest 
notion  of  God  Himself.  Nothing  so  exalted  or  so  adequate 
could  be  said  of  Him  as  that  He  is  the  ultimate  or  universal 
Substance.  Hence  it  is  not  surprising  that  they  should 
have  spoken  freely  of  a  substantial  union  with  the  Lord. 
Such  a  union  was  for  their  minds  the  most  real  imaginable, 
and  was  regarded  as  being  laden  with  a  secret  and  ineffable 
significance  far  transcending  all  conscious  ethical  relation- 
ships. We  may  so  far  sympathise  with  this  as  to  hold 
that  our  ethical  relations  to  Christ  are  in  point  of  fact 
more  profoundly  intimate  than  any  which  obtain  between 
one  man  and  another,  and  also  that  they  may  be  suitably 
described  as  "  mystic."  But  we  have  to  put  aside  the 
category  "  substance "  and  construe  the  facts  freshly  in 
terms  of  personality.  On  the  accepted  principle  of  modern 
philosophy  that  there  are  degrees  of  reality,  a  personal 
union  ought  to  be  regarded  as  infinitely  more  real  than  a 
"  substantial "  one. 

Now  in  this  sense  it  is  not  putting  it  too  strongly  to 
say  that  union  with  Christ  is  a  brief  name  for  all  that 
the  apostles  mean  by  salvation.  For  St.  Paul  and  St. 
John  oneness  with  Christ  is  to  be  redeemed,  and  to  be 
redeemed  is  oneness  with  Christ.  Illustrations  readily 
occur.  For  example,  in  a  phrase,  which,  if  we  read 
it  for  the  first  time,  would  startle  and  confound  us,  St. 
Paul  writes  (1  Co  6^'^) :  "  He  who  cleaves  to  the  Lord 
is  one  spirit."  As  it  is  said  elsewhere  of  man  and  wife 
that  they  two  are  one  flesh,  so,  the  apostle's  words  imply 
— and  they  set  forth,  be  it  remembered,  the  classical 
Christian  experience,  not  a  peripheral  eccentricity — a 
spiritual  unity  no  less  real  and  close  in  its  far  higher 
sphere  is  established  by  saving  faith  between  a  man  and 


UNION    WITH    CHRIST  335 

his  Eedeeiner.  It  is  a  union  tluit  lasts  as  the  other  does 
not,  and  has  effects  the  other  can  never  have.  Another 
remarkable  metaphor  occurs  in  Gal  4^^,  where  he  speaks 
of  Christ  being  formed  as  an  embryo  within  the  soul.^ 
And  there  is  the  ever-recurrent  form  "  in  Christ,"  with 
its  converse  "  Christ  in  you."  But  Gal  2'^^  is  the  locu8 
dassicus :  "  I  have  been  crucified  with  Christ,  and  it  is  no 
longer  I  who  live,  Christ  lives  in  me."  The  writer  feels 
as  if  he  had  lost  his  old  self  and  all  but  changed  his 
identity.  There  has  been  the  importation  of  another's 
personality  into  him ;  what  he  was  had  ceased  to  be,  and 
what  remained  had  a  better  right  to  Christ's  name  than 
his  own.  No  doubt  the  verse  was  written  at  a  white 
heat,  and  the  apostle,  had  he  been  cross-examined,  would 
have  admitted  that  he  did  not  after  all  mean  that 
Christ  and  Paul  were  so  utterly  identical  as  to  be  indis- 
tinguishable ;  but  this  only  indicates  that  language  has 
broken  down  under  an  intolerable  strain,  and  that  words 
which  at  their  best  must  always  be  general  are  unequal 
to  expressing  a  fact  that  is  totally  unparalleled.  What 
St.  Paul  asserts  is  at  least  infinitely  nearer  to  truth  than 
its  negation  would  be.  He  stands  for  a  truly  spiritual 
union ;  a  reciprocal  appropriation  and  interpenetration  of 
spirit  by  spirit.  The  bond  between  them  is  sufficiently 
powerful  to  support  the  assignation  of  the  same  predicates 
to  both.  Our  solidarity  with  Christ  is  such  that  in  His 
death  we  also  die ;  in  His  grave  we  are  buried ;  with  the 
Eisen  Lord,  and  in  Him,  we  too  rise  to  newness  of  life. 
Nor  can  an  attentive  reader  fail  to  notice  that  St.  Paul's 
greatest  words  on  the  subject  of  atonement  occur  in  tliis 
connection.  Pto  8^  is  typical :  "  There  is  now  no  con- 
demnation to  them  that  are  in  Christ  Jesus " ;  and  still 
more  emphatic  is  2  Co  5" :  "  We  thus  judge,  that  one 
died  for  all,  therefore  all  died."  There  is  a  sense  in  which 
Christ's  death  is,  or  becomes,  ours.  The  sentence  of 
death,  executed  on  the  Head,  takes  eftect  eo  ijjso  on  the 
members,  not  by  a  fictitious  legal  transference  of  role,  but 
'  Cf.  Sanday,  Christologics  Ancient  and  Modern,  122. 


336  THE    PERSON    OF   JESUS    CHRIST 

in  virtue  of  personal  incorporation.  The  believer,  in 
familiar  phrase,  has  "  an  interest "  in  Christ's  death 
because  he  has  an  interest  in  Christ  Himself,  and  has  so 
lived  himself  by  faith  into  Christ's  personal  being  that 
old  things  have  passed  away,  and  all  things — including 
and  centring  in  his  old  self — have  become  new.^ 

St.  John,  who  speaks  the  last  word  on  the  great 
Christian  certainties,  repeats  still  more  convincingly  the 
assertion  that  union  with  Christ  is  the  secret  of  redemption. 
"  This  doctrine  of  a  mystical  union,"  says  Professor  Ernest 
Scott,  "  in  which  the  higher  life  flows  uninterruptedly  from 
Christ  to  the  believer,  contains  the  central  and  character- 
istic thought  of  the  Fourth  Gospel."  ^  It  is  true  that 
Professor  Scott  goes  on  to  argue  that  a  totally  unethical 
and  realistic  factor  enters  into  the  Johannine  conception. 
Metaphysical  categories,  in  his  opinion,  have  ousted  the 
moral  and  religious  categories  of  earlier  Christian  thought, 
or  at  all  events  relegated  them  to  a  secondary  place,  all 
possibility  of  man's  participating  in  the  Divine  life  being 
foreclosed  until  the  very  constitution  of  his  nature  has 
been  radically  changed  by  the  infusion  of  the  higher 
quasi-physical  essence  present  in  Christ.  But  it  is  very 
difficult,  if  not  quite  impossible,  to  reconcile  this  view 
with  the  emphasis  which  the  evangelist  uniformly  lays 
on  faith.  Union  with  Christ,  alike  in  the  Gospel  and  in 
the  First  Epistle,  is  the  intelligible  outcome,  as  well  as 
the  foundation  and  source,  of  ethical  and  spiritual  ex- 
periences. At  every  point  it  is  relative  to  personal 
apprehension  of  the  word  of  life :  "  If  that  which  ye  heard 
from  the  beginning  abide  in  you,  ye  also  shall  abide  in 
the  Son  and  in  the  Father"  (1  Jn  2^^).  So  too  in  the 
Gospel  it  is  through  "  belief "  in  the  sense  of  personal 
cognizance  and  self-committal  that  the  impartation  of  the 
life  which  resides  in  Christ  is  mediated  to  His  people. 
But  the  crowning  proof  that  it  is  mistaken  to  interpret 

1  For  a  striking  argument  that  the  Epistle  to  the  Hebrews  takes  the  same 
line,  cf.  E.  A.  Abbott,  The  Message  of  the  Son  of  Man,  83. 

2  The  Fourth  Gospel,  289. 


UNION    WITH    CHRIST  837 

St.  John's  symbolic  phrases  in  a  literal  or  realistic  sense 
is  the  fact  that  these  very  phrases,  or  their  equivalents, 
are  used  freely  by  every  powerful  religious  writer  to  this 
day,  not  least  by  those  to  whom  the  realistic  view  is 
abhorrent. 

This  preliminary  objection  disposed  of,  we  may  note 
the  images  by  which  St.  John  expresses  union  with 
Christ.  They  are  familiar  to  every  one.  Christ  is  the 
Vine,  in  which  believers  are  grafted  as  living  branches. 
He  is  the  Bread  of  Life,  by  eating  which  they  live  for 
ever.  Exactly  as  in  St.  Paul,  the  mystic  union  is  capable 
of  being  contemplated  alternately  from  either  side,  and 
can  be  described  equally  by  the  phrases  "  ye  in  Me  "  and 
"  I  in  you."  The  first  appears  to  mean  that  the  Christian's 
life  is  rooted  in  Christ  and  has  in  Him  its  encompassing 
vital  element  and  medium  ;  the  second  that  He  Himself 
is  present  in  His  people  as  the  living  centre,  the  animating 
principle,  of  their  iamost  being.  Now  in  all  such  passages 
we  feel  that  the  distinction  between  Christology  and 
soteriology,  never  more  than  provisional  anyhow,  has 
simply  disappeared.  And  the  point  to  be  emphasised  is 
this,  that  the  experienced  influence  of  Christ  on  men — 
still  the  same  for  us  as  for  St.  John — leads  perforce  to 
a  certain  definite  view  of  His  nature.  He  is  definable 
as  the  Person  who  can  thus  be  our  inward  Life,  while  on 
the  other  hand  it  is  because  He  is  this  universal  Person 
that  His  relation  to  us  can  be  of  this  interior  kind. 
Personality  and  possession  mutually  condition  each  other. 
To  sustain  this  unparalleled  relation  to  men,  to  impart 
Himself  to  them  so  that  they  have  Him  within  and  can 
hold  fellowship  with  Him  as  with  their  own  souls — this 
is  a  capacity  or  act  which  we  can  only  interpret  as 
specifically  Divine.^     Not   only    so;    the  fellowship   thus 

^Principal  Fairbairn  puts  this  -vrel]  from  the  other  side  :  "The  nature 
that  is  in  all  men  akin  to  Deity  becomes  in  Christ  a  nature  in  personal  union 
with  the  Deity,  and  the  unio  j^crsonalis,  which  is  peculiar  to  Him,  is  the 
basis  of  the  unio  mystica,  which  is  jiossible  to  all  "  [Christ  in  Modem 
Theology,  475). 

22 


338  THE   PERSON    OF    JESUS    CHRIST 

established  with  Christ  is  set  forth  in  the  Kew  Testament, 
and  is  still  felt  by  all  believers  as  being  intrinsically 
and  purely  in  itself  fellowship  with  God.  To  have  the 
Son  is  to  have  the  Father  also.  Union  with  Christ  is  in 
no  sense  a  preliminary  step  to  union  with  God,  or  a  pre- 
paration for  it  which  may  be  ignored  subsequently  to  the 
attainment  of  the  real  goal ;  it  is  union  with  God  per  se. 
Or,  to  put  it  otherwise,  the  one  is  the  method  of  the  other, 
the  form  in  which  it  is  held  forth  to  sinful  men.  Now 
this  complex  yet  so  luminous  fact,  that  Christ  is  felt  to 
sustain  a  relation  of  indwelling  in  unnumbered  souls,  to 
which  their  indwelling  in  Him  corresponds — and  that  in 
this  relation  they  know  themselves  one  with  God — points 
to  the  real  argument  for  the  higher  being  of  Jesus  Christ 
which  we  feel  to  be  implicit  in  the  apostolic  testimony  as 
a  whole. 

Nothing  can  indeed  be  said  as  to  the  experimentally 
verified  coalescence  of  life  between  the  Eedeemer  and  the 
redeemed  which  is  too  emphatic  for  the  New  Testament. 
At  every  point  it  is  fundamental,  for  it  interprets  both 
the  forgiveness  of  sins  and  the  sanctification  of  the 
sinner.  And  if  to-day  many  people  still  prefer  the  word 
"  mystic "  to  "  moral "  as  an  adequate  description  of  the 
believer's  relation  to  Christ,  this  is  in  part  because  they 
feel  that  the  union  in  which  they  are  personally  identified 
with  Christ  is  far  and  beyond  anything  they  have  experi- 
enced in  their  relations  to  fellow-men,  in  part  because  the 
word  "  moral "  makes  no  provision,  or  an  insufficient  one 
at  best,  for  the  fundamental  truth  that  this  unity  is  initi- 
ated on  His  side  and  sustained  at  every  point  by  His 
power. 

It  may  be,  of  course,  that  our  conception  of  personality 
must  be  revised  before  we  can  make  much  in  a  philo- 
sophical way  of  a  fact  like  the  mystic  union,  but  some- 
thing of  that  kind  is  plainly  needed  and  as  plainly  is 
coming.  We  are  far  away  now  from  the  point  of  view  at 
which  Strauss  wrote  that  "  Personality  is  that  self-hood 
which  shuts  itself    up  against  everything  else,  excluding 


UNION    WITH    CHRIST  339 

it  thereby  from  itself."  ^  This  may  be  described  as  the 
adamantine  theory  of  personaHty  ;  the  world  of  persons, 
it  implies,  is  best  illustrated  by  a  number  of  marbles  in 
a  box,  as  to  which  the  last  word  we  can  say  is  that  each 
of  tliem  is  utterly  outside  its  neighbour.  Is  that  the 
whole  trutli  ?  Is  it  even  the  best  part  of  the  truth  ? 
Surely  those  who  have  tasted  the  sacred  joys  of  that 
human  love  which  is  our  best  analogue  to  religious  com- 
munion will  feel  that  impenetrable  solitude  of  spirit  is  not 
the  deepest  thing  in  us.  On  the  contrary,  it  is  possible, 
in  some  real  degree,  to  escape  from  ourselves,  and  mingle 
in  love  and  thought  and  will  in  the  lives  of  others.  "  We 
are  persons,"  as  it  has  been  put,  "  not  by  our  power  of 
self-isolation,  but  by  our  power  of  transcending  that 
isolation  and  linking  ourselves  to  others,  and  others  to 
ourselves."  ^  The  bearing  of  this  on  our  present  subject 
is  obviously  to  suggest  that  it  is  only  an  extension  of 
principles  already  implicit  in  our  social  existence  as 
human  beings  when  we  speak  of  a  true  solidarity  of  life, 
a  spiritual  coalescence,  between  Christ  and  His  people. 
And  if,  as  Lotze  has  argued  so  impressively,  personality 
in  us  is  incomplete,  and  exists  perfectly  in  God  only,  we 
may  well  conclude  that  this  self-communicating  power 
which  we  possess  only  in  part  will  have  its  perfection  and 
fulness  in  Him,  and  therefore  also  in  Christ  who  is  God 
apprehensible  by  us.^ 

Christian    experience,    then,    as    summarily    described 

^  Der  christliche  Glauhenslehrc,  i.  504. 
2  Lofthouse,  Ethics  and  Atonement,  117. 

2  Browning  touches  this  point  and  resumes  our  whole  argument  in  the 
well-known  lines  which  conclude  his  Death  in  the  Desert : — 

"  See  if,  for  every  finger  of  thy  hands, 

There  be  not  found,  that  day  the  world  shall  end, 
Hundreds  of  souls,  each  holding  by  Christ's  word 
That  He  will  grow  incorporate  with  all, 
With  me  as  Pamphylax,  with  him  as  John, 
Groom  for  each  bride  !     Can  a  mere  man  do  this  ? 
Yet  Christ  saith,  this  He  lived  and  died  to  do. 
Call  Christ,  then,  the  illimitable  Cod." 


340  THE    PERSON    OF   JESUS    CHRIST 

by   the    term   mystic   union,   implies   a    Saviour    at    once 
Divine  and  human.^ 

(4)  We  need  not  labour  the  point  that  Christ  has 
given  to  men  the  perfect  revelation  of  the  Father.  To 
redeem  by  authority,  by  atonement,  by  the  gift  of  life — 
this  is  revelation.  The  words  of  Jesus  are  the  voice  of 
God.  The  tears  of  Jesus  are  the  pity  of  God.  The 
wrath  of  Jesus  is  the  judgment  of  God.  All  believers 
confess,  with  adoring  praise,  that  in  their  most  sacred 
hours  God  and  Christ  merge  in  each  other  with  morally 
indistinguishable  identity.  When  in  secret  we  look  into 
God's  face,  still  it  is  the  face  of  Christ  that  rises  up  before 
us.  To  do  Christ's  will  and  God's  is  one  thing.  When 
we  inquire  as  to  the  precise  content  of  the  term  "  God " 
for  our  minds,  and  ask  how  it  has  been  authenticated,  we 
discover,  it  may  be  with  some  surprise,  that  without 
reasoning  we  have  transferred  to  God  the  features  of 
Christ — holy  and  almighty  love.  We  are  really  thinking 
of  Jesus,  with  His  essential  features  exalted  to  infinity. 
Indeed,  the  late  Dr.  Martineau  could  go  so  far  as  to 
maintain  that  Unitarians,  worshipping  as'  they  thought 
God  the  Father,  have  all  the  while  paid  their  worship  to 
.the  Son.2  In  regard  to  the  fact,  then,  there  can  be 
no  dispute.  Christ  is  the  revealer  of  God.  Than  His 
revelation  none  more  perfect  can  be  conceived.  In  Him 
the  Divine  character  appears  in  terms  of  manhood.      It  is 

^  Principal  James  Drummond's  fine  Stvdies  in  Christian  Doctrine  (1908) 
is  written  from  an  avowedly  Unitarian  standpoint,  but  it  is  difficult  not  to 
feel  that  it  is  inspired  by  a  view  of  Christ  for  which  logical  Unitarianism  can 
make  no  room.  Thus  at  one  point  he  speaks  of  Christianity  as  being 
"Christ  in  the  heart,  the  heart  resting  in  Christ,  so  full  of  faith  and  life 
as  to  find  itself  at  home  in  God"  (275);  and  he  writes  later:  "Jesus 
is,  to  the  heart  that  loves  him,  'a  quickening  spirit,'  one  who  forms  the 
interior  life,  and  fills  it  with  an  abounding  energy"  (291);  "Jesus 
continues  daily  to  dwell  in  the  heart  by  faith,  and  to  print  there  the 
impress  of  his  spirit"  (301).  Nor  is  there  any  attempt  in  his  pages  to 
separate  what  has  been  fancifully  called  the  Christ-idea  from  the  Christ  of 
history. 

*  A  Way  out  of  the  Trinitarian  CorUroversy. 


CHRIST  AS  PERFECT  REVEALER        341 

set  before  us  ;  we  are  not  told  about  it,  but  we  are  bidden 
to  behold  it.  How  then  does  this  aspect  of  His  work — of 
all  aspects  the  most  conipreheusive  and  far-reacliing — give 
light  on  His  person  ?  Can  we  say  that  the  ex[)erieuce  of 
Christ's  revealership  holds  a  Christology  in  solution  ? 

The  answer  may  be  put  briefly  by  saying  that  only  He 
can  reveal  perfectly  who  is  what  He  reveals.  If  He  be 
less  than  quite  identical  with  that  which  is  made  manifest, 
the  manifestation  is  so  far  religiously  insufficient.  If  He 
be  but  a  replica  of  God  in  creaturely  or  angelic  form — 
more  than  man,  perhaps,  but  only  in  some  semi-divine  or 
Ariau  sense — the  fulness  of  the  Godhead  could  not  be  in 
Him  for  us.  For  recollect  what  the  Christian  mind  does. 
It  does  not  place  Christ  alongside  of  God,  and  argue  from 
one  to  the  other;  instead,  it  finds  God  personally  present 
in  Christ  and  responds  to  Him  so,  immediately.  As  the 
result  of  His  being  in  the  world,  men  possess  and  hold 
God  in  quite  a  new  way — a  possession  which  is  unintel- 
ligible save  as  mediated  by  a  Divine  reality.  One  less 
than  God,  moreover,  would  in  conscience  have  been 
obliged  to  point  men  quite  beyond  Himself,  to  utter  a 
protest  against  the  idolising  love  of  His  disciples,  to  warn 
against  a  too  close  association  of  the  gospel  with  His 
person.  This  Jesus  never  does.  Eather  He  lived  out  the 
transcendent  life  which  constituted  His  personality,  con- 
fronting men  as  His  Divine  self,  and  letting  the  fact  of 
His  being  tell  on  their  minds  as  a  revelation.  He  has 
put  the  Father  within  our  reach,  as  faithfully  and  un- 
changeably Eedeemer,  but  He  could  do  so  only  because  He 
was  one  with  that  which  He  conveyed. 

Once  more,  therefore,  the  actual  work  or  influence  of 
Jesus  leads  the  mind  spontaneously  in  the  direction  of  a 
certain  interpretation  of  His  person. 

In  conclusion,  it  may  be  noted  that  if   the  work  of 
Christ  illuminates  His  person,  the  converse  proposition  also 
holds  good.^     The  work  is  made  luminous  by  the  person. 
»  Cf.  Edgehill,  The  Revelation  of  the  Son  of  God,  141-47. 


342  THE    PERSON    OP   JESUS    CHRIST 

We  are  not  getting  out  of  touch  with  the  New  Testament 
when  we  insist  on  this  ;  we  are  only  receiving  on  our 
mind  something  of  its  richness  and  variety.  To  St.  Paul, 
for  example,  the  fundamental  truth  about  Christ  was  not 
something  He  had  done,  but  something  that  He  was.  His 
action  revealed  His  being.  "  What  Christ  did  for  men  is 
accounted  for  by  what  He  is  to  God.  The  relationship  of 
Christ  to  God  gave  supreme  worth  in  St.  Paul's  eyes  to  His 
sacrifice,  and  turned  the  shameful  cross  into  the  glorious 
revelation  of  God's  love  to  mankind."  ^  The  Fourth  Gospel 
pursues  this  line.  It  seeks  to  understand  the  acts  and 
history  of  Christ  in  the  light  of  the  assured  truth  that  by 
original  nature  He  was  the  Son  of  God.  Whereas  the 
Synoptic  writers  move  rather  from  the  historic  facts  to  the 
person  they  express.  But  the  legitimacy  of  both  methods 
is  indisputable.  If,  as  we  have  seen,  the  work  is  the 
ratio  cognoscendi  of  the  nature,  not  less  true  is  it  that  the 
nature  is  the  ratio  essendi  of  the  work,  and  that  we  can 
see  this  to  be  the  case.  Hence  the  positivism  which 
insists  only  on  the  facts  of  Jesus'  recorded  life,  but  will 
tolerate  no  Christology,  does  not  even  apprehend  the  facts 
in  their  proper  fulness  and  significance.  Just  as  in  music 
the  import  of  a  chord  depends  largely  on  the  antecedent 
phrases,  quality  as  perceived  being  thus  conditioned  by  its 
context,  so  in  Christian  religion  it  is  of  immeuse  signifi- 
cance for  our  appreciation  of  the  cross  whether  we  do  or 
do  not  understand  that  He  who  suffered  there  had  come 
forth  in  grace  from  the  eternal  life  of  God.  There  are 
difficulties  moreover  in  the  doctrine  of  atonement — as  our 
study  of  the  mystic  union  has  clearly  shown — which  we 
can  elucidate  only  by  taking  the  subject,  in  McLeod 
Campbell's  phrase,  "  to  the  light  of  the  Incarnation." 

It  is  indeed  an  error  alike  in  method  and  interpretation 
when  the  Atonement  and  the  Incarnation  are  viewed  as 
rival  or  competing  interests,  either  of  which  gains  at  the 
other's  cost.  By  some  writers  it  has  been  contended  that 
the    Atonement    exclusively   is    the   proper   foundation   of 

1  G.  G.  Findlay,  Hastings'  DB.  iii.  722. 


WORK    AND    PERSON  343 

theology,  the  Incarnation  being  exchided  from  the  sphere 
of  doctrinal  inquiry,  on  the  ground  that  it  is  either 
mysterious  or  subordinate ;  by  others,  that  the  Incarnation 
alone  is  what  really  counts,  and  that  it  mainly  counts  in 
virtue  of  its  significance  for  purely  speculative  problems. 
But  the  contrast  is  false.  There  is  no  rivalry  between  a 
tree-stem  and  its  fruit,  for  each  is  only  as  related  to  and 
determined  by  the  other ;  so  the  Incarnation  and  the 
Atonement,  the  person  and  the  work  of  Christ,  have 
concrete  and  intelligible  reality  only  as  they  constitute 
and  define  each  other  in  the  unity  of  a  single  experience. 
Life  exhibits  no  break  or  cleft  dissevering  the  two ;  in 
Jesus  Christ  supremely  being  and  doing  are  one.  This  is 
true  for  us,  who  contemplate  all  that  He  was  and  did  from 
the  outside,  but  it  may  be  true  also  for  His  own  mind. 
It  is  possible  that  Jesus  came  to  full  self-consciousness,  to 
the  complete  apprehension  of  His  own  nature,  in  its 
eternity  before  and  after,  through  the  accomplishment  on 
the  cross  of  the  work  given  Him  to  do. 

"We  have  now  completed  the  discussion  of  certain 
preliminary  topics  which  lie  on  the  threshold  of  Christo- 
logical  inquiry.  First,  the  need  of  Christology  as  such 
was  canvassed,  and  it  became  clear  that  this  perennial 
requirement  of  the  Church  cannot  be  secured  either  by  a 
verbal  acceptance  of  tradition  or  by  the  positivism  which 
insists  on  bare  facts  and  will  hear  nothing  of  interpretation. 
Next,  we  sought  to  define  the  correspondence  which  must 
obtain  between  Christological  construction  and  the  classical 
delineation  of  Jesus  contained  in  the  New  Testament. 
Finally,  it  was  shown  that  our  view  of  Christ's  person  is 
invariably  determined  by  our  conception  of  His  saving 
work. 

The  following  argument  will  contain  two  main  parts. 
In  the  first  we  shall  examine  the  immediate  utterances 
of  faith  regarding  Christ  as  it  grasps  Him  in  the  ex- 
perience of  redemption.  In  the  second  will  be  discussed 
the     transcendent     presuppositions     or    implicates    which 


344  THE   PERSON    OF   JESUS    CHRIST 

appear  to  be  latent  in  these  naive  religious  certainties. 
These  remoter  principles  are  implicit  in  faith,  and  con- 
stitute therefore  a  true  element  in  the  doctrine ;  on  the 
other  hand  they  are  only  implicit,  not  actual  ingredients 
in  that  of  which  faith  is  directly  conscious.  It  is  an 
advantage  of  this  division  that  we  are  enabled  to  do  some 
real  justice  to  the  unanimity  of  believers  as  regards  their 
personal  and  instinctive  view  of  Christ,  without  being 
unduly  perturbed  in  advance  by  subsequent  problems  of 
a  more  recondite  nature  on  which  opinions  are  certain 
to  diverge.  As  we  have  already  seen,  however,  these 
transcendent  questions  cannot  be  ignored  on  the  ground 
that  metaphysic  has  no  place  in  theology.  "  The  power  of 
the  Church  to  propagate  her  faith,"  it  has  been  said,  "  is 
largely  dependent  on  her  power  to  commend  the  great 
truths  of  the  Gospel  to  the  understanding  as  well  as  the 
hearts  of  men."  ^  It  is  vain  to  suppose  that  the  interest 
in  truth  which  is  native  to  the  religious  consciousness  can 
be  suppressed  by  the  ukase  of  any  philosopher  or 
theologian,  or  that  people  can  be  kept  from  asking 
questions  about  Christ,  His  antecedents,  the  constitution 
of  His  person,  and  His  present  relation  to  believers. 
When  these  problems  are  once  ventilated,  theology  must 
even  do  her  best  to  solve  them,  or — which  is  certainly 
not  less  important — prove  convincingly  why  they  can 
never  be  solved. 

1  Tymms,  Christian  Idea  of  Atonement,  4. 


PART  II. 

THE  IMMEDIATE  UTTERANCES 
OF  FAITH. 

CHAPTEK   IV. 

CHRIST  THE  OBJECT  OF  FAITH. 

It  is  desirable,  as  a  recent  suggestive  writer  has  iirged,^ 
that  in  Cbristology  we  should  set  out  from  some  one  truth 
or  principle,  simple  in  character,  as  to  which  a  wide 
measure  of  consent  may  be  assumed.  Theologians  have 
always  tended  to  mark  diversities  of  opinion  more  than 
agreement ;  they  have  weakened  their  case  by  over- 
indulgence in  this  habit ;  and  the  failure  to  strike  the 
note  of  harmony  at  the  outset  may — in  view  of  the 
immense  variety  of  historic  solutions — fill  the  student 
with  a  sense  of  despair  or  revulsion,  leading  him  to  throw 
up  the  problem  as  impenetrable.  In  view  of  this,  we 
shall  do  wisely  to  fix  our  starting-point  in  a  conviction 
shared  by  all  Christian  minds. 

This  conviction  we  find  in  the  belief  that  Jesus  is  the 
object  of  religious  faith.  We  are  called  not  to  believe  like 
Him  merely,  but  to   believe   in  Him.     Faith  in  God   as 

Literature — Denney,  Jesus  and  the  Gospel,  1908  ;  Herrmann,  Com- 
mxmion  with  God,  1906  ;  Hogg,  Clirisfs  Message  of  the  Kingdom,  1911  ;  van 
Dyke,  The  Gospel  for  an  Age  of  Dotibt,  1896 ;  Kiihler,  Angcwandten 
Dogmen,  1908  ;  Harnack,  What  is  Christianity?  1901  ;  Adams  Brown, 
Christian  Theology  in  Outline,  1906  ;  Bousset,  Jesus,  1906  ;  Forrest,  The 
Authority  of  Christ,  1906  ;  Orr,  Christian  View  of  God  avd  the  Worlds 
1893  ;  Seeberg,  Grv.ndwahrheite.n  der  chrisllichen  licliyion,  1903. 

^  Haering,  op.  cU.  370  tf. 

346 


346  THE    PERSON    OF    JESUS    CHRIST 

Father  is  indissociably  connected  with  faith  in  Christ  as  Soa 
It  is  true  that  a  certain  faith  in  God  may  exist  independ- 
ently of  Christ,  but  in  such  a  case  both  "  faith  "  and  "  God," 
which  are  always  correlates,  mean  less  than  they  do  within 
the  Christian  society.  The  first  is  something  less  than 
childlike  confidence ;  the  second  is  less  than  the  God  and 
Father  of  our  Lord.  From  the  very  outset,  believers  were 
aware  that  a  new  apprehension  of  God  had  been  mediated 
to  them  by  Jesus.  One  of  the  first  efforts  at  definition  of 
a  Christian  is  that  implied  in  St.  Peter's  words :  "  Ye 
who  through  Ilim  do  believe  in  God."  The  faith  conveyed 
by  Jesus  is  no  mere  abstract  truth  separable  from  Himself, 
as  the  truth  of  the  law  of  gravitation  is  separable  from 
Newton.  We  are  able  to  understand  and  use  the  laws 
of  nature  while  totally  ignorant  of  those  to  whose  research 
and  genius  our  knowledge  of  them  is  due,  but  the  highest 
and  purest  faith  in  God  can  be  attained  in  no  way  but 
one ;  it  comes  through  a  believing  response  to  the  person 
of  Jesus  Christ.  It  is  what  we  see  in  Jesus  that  inspires 
a  triumphant  certainty  of  God.  All  great  saints  in  the 
past,  all  who  at  this  hour  enjoy  the  peace  of  reconcilation 
and  are  labouring  with  buoyant  energy  at  the  tasks  of  the 
Divine  kingdom,  are  evidences  and  illustrations  of  this. 
The  apostle's  two-edged  word  is  only  a  transcript  of  ex- 
perience :  "  Whosoever  denieth  the  Son,  the  same  hath  not 
the  Father :  he  that  coufesseth  the  Son  hath  the  Father 
also."  Apart  from  Jesus  men  may  know  much  of 
God — of  His  wisdom,  His  power,  His  sublimity,  even  His 
benevolence ;  but  of  His  Fatherhood,  with  all  the  loving- 
kindness  to  the  sinful  embraced  in  that  great  name,  they 
can  know  nothing.  Nowadays  we  speak  with  easy  assur- 
ance of  the  love  of  God.  It  appears  as  something  obvious, 
simple,  self-explanatory.  In  fact,  as  the  very  familiarity 
of  the  Gospel  may  have  concealed  from  us,  it  is  in  Jesus 
alone,  and  supremely  in  His  cross,  that  assurance  can  be 
found  that  God's  mind  to  us  is  the  mind  of  a  true  Father. 
Hence  it  is  literally  accurate  to  say  that  the  displacement 
of    Christ   from   a   central    position   within   the  object  of 


FAITH    IN    (iOD    AND    IN    CHRIST  347 

religions  belief  would  so  change  and  impoverisli  faith  as 
a  mental  attitude  as  to  destroy  its  specifically  Christian 
quality.  Its  unique  tone  of  finality,  joy,  and  unreserve 
would  vanish,  and  its  place  would  be  taken  by  thoughts 
and  feelings  not  indeed  quite  meagre  or  unworthy,  yet 
incontestably  sub-Christian  in  religious  power  and  moral 
inspiration. 

Full  trust  in  God  the  Father,  then,  is  uniformly  associated 
with  trust  in  Jesus.^  It  is  this  faith  in  Jesus  which  gives 
unity  to  the  New  Testament,  inspires  all  preaching  worthy 
of  the  name,  and  forms  the  vital  continuity  of  the  Chris- 
tian ages.  Yet  somehow  it  is  independent  of,  or  at  least 
distinct  from,  elaborated  theories  of  Jesus'  person.  The 
striking  fact  that  so  many  modern  thinkers,  though  not  un- 
willing to  admire  Jesus  and  applaud  His  social  programme, 
should  resolutely  decline  to  acknowledge  His  supreme 
authority  and  Mediatorship  or  to  be  indebted  to  Him 
for  everything  worth  calling  life,  and  in  this  declinature 
should  be  perfectly  conscious  that  they  are  at  war  with 
His  own  expressed  conviction,  is  not  without  its  lesson. 
It  proves  that  at  this  point  we  touch  the  very  essence  of 
the  Christian  religion.  Men  are  instinctively  aware  that 
the  Gospel  summons  them  to  an  infinite  resolve  when  it 
l)ids  them  bow  in  self-abandoning  trust  at  the  feet  of 
Christ.  This  is  not  something  we  can  do  by  making  a 
great  effort,  or  putting  a  strain  upon  ourselves ;  it  is 
something  which,  unaided,  we  cannot  do  at  all.  No  man 
can  say  "  Jesus  is  Lord  "  but  by  the  Holy  Spirit.  It  takes 
the  very  power  of  God  to  evoke  such  a  confession  as  that. 
When  we  look  to  Jesus,  and,  realising  the  significance  of 
the  act,  cast  ourselves  upon  Him  with  adoring  faith, 
giving  to  Him  with  a  solemn  exultation   "  all  that  the  soul 

^  Hainack  declares  that  "  the  Gospel,  as  Jesus  proclaimed  it,  has  to  do 
with  the  Father  only,  aud  not  with  the  Son  "  (  What  is  ChridianUy  ?  144). 
But  he  is  equally  emphatic  on  the  other  side.  Thus  we  are  told  (DG.^  iii. 
69  f.)  that  "  the  Gospel  can  only  he  grasped  and  held  firm  by  a  believing 
self-surrender  to  the  Person  of  Christ.  Every  relation  to  God  is  at  the 
same  time  a  relation  to  Jesus  Christ."  Whether  the  two  positions  are  com- 
patible is  another  matter. 


348  THE    PERSON    OF    JESUS    CHRIST 

can  ever  give  to  God,"  we  have  done  what  is  supernatural. 
It  is  specifically  the  work  of  God  within  us. 

In  faith  of  this  type,  be  it  noted  clearly,  God  and 
Christ  are  not  held  apart,  or  connected  merely  by  inferen- 
tial reasoning ;  they  are  apprehended  together  in  a  single 
movement.  In  laying  hold  of  Christ  we  lay  hold  of  God 
personally  present  in  Him,  but  nowhere  else  offered  to 
us  in  this  personal  fashion,  nowhere  else  certified  and 
conveyed  to  us  as  Eedeemer.  Apart  from  Jesus,  our  ideas 
of  God  are  imperfect  and  misleading.  He  makes  a  revela- 
tion of  the  Father  which  is  new  and  "  legible  only  by  the 
light  it  gives,"  Of  this  complete  faith  in  God,  therefore, 
Jesus  is  not  merely  the  historic  origin ;  He  is  its  abid- 
ing ground  or  medium.  Trust  in  God  and  trust  in  Christ 
are  vitally  correlative ;  neither  is  definable  in  abstraction 
from  the  other.  We  do  not  believe  in  God  irrespectively 
of  Jesus,  much  less  in  Jesus  apart  from  God  or  as  wor- 
shipped independently  for  His  own  sake ;  we  believe  in 
God  the  Father  as  He  is  made  near  and  sure  to  us  in 
the  Son.  Only  in  the  medium  or  Mediator  is  the  great 
reality  ours.  Hence  faith  never  transcends  Christ,  never, 
as  in  pseudo-mysticism,  pretends  to  be  superior  to  His 
recorded  life  as  a  source  of  knowledge  long  since  anti- 
quated, never  tries  to  be  wiser  than  historic  fact.  Jesus' 
word  is  final  in  its  precise  truth  to  experience :  "  He  that 
hath  seen  Me  hath  seen  the  Father." 

The  classic  exposition  of  faith  in  this  sense  is  the 
New  Testament.  In  its  pages  Jesus  stands  in  the  focus 
of  religion ;  from  first  to  last  He  is  the  object  of  that 
mingled  trust,  awe,  and  love  which  we  call  worship.  It 
does  not  occur  to  any  of  the  apostolic  writers  that  this 
is  a  fact  requiring  either  explanation  or  apology.  We 
see  not  a  trace  of  embarrassment ;  at  each  point  they  are 
speaking  directly  out  of  experience  and  striving  to  convey 
the  same  new  sense  of  Christ  to  others.  It  is  obvious 
that  the  spirit  of  Jesus  dominates  their  spirits,  modifying 
belief,  re-shaping  ideals  and  enthusiasms,  making  new  the 


THE   NEW   TESTAMENT    FAITH  349 

soul's  environment,  transmuting  the  flow  of  conscious 
thought,  laying  on  the  will  an  unseen  constraint  to  that 
service  which  is  perfect  freedom.  To  this  more  than 
human  influence  they  respond  with  an  intensity  which  has 
no  reserves.  They  rest  on  Jesus  only  for  all  that  can  be 
called  salvation.  Their  monotheism  is  a  passion  which 
repels  idolatry  as  the  one  unpardonable  sin ;  yet  in  face 
of  this  they  put  their  whole  faith  in  Jesus  Christ.  Some- 
one has  observed  that  a  high  Christology  has  often  been 
accompanied  by  a  weak  sense  of  God,  but  the  implicit 
censure,  however,  relevant  to  certain  historic  sentimental- 
isms,  is  inapposite  to  the  Xew  Testament.^  Religion,  as 
religion,  is  theocentric  to  the  core ;  and  the  irresistible 
impulse  of  which  the  apostles  were  conscious  to  give  Jesus 
the  central  place  in  religion  was  for  them  the  final  ethical 
proof  that  He  could  not  be  lower  than  the  highest  God- 
head. As  source  of  pardon,  as  giver  of  new  life,  as 
medium  and  vehicle  of  a  presence  of  God  beyond  which 
the  mind  can  never  go,  He  conveyed  to  them  the  powers 
of  the  higher  world ;  and  if  the  traditional  concept  of  the 
Divine  was  incapable  of  making  room  for  the  creative 
and  unparalleled  content  of  His  person,  it  must  perforce 
be  deepened  and  widened.  It  was  at  least  certain  that 
He  who  made  the  Father  known  must  have  come  forth 
from  the  Father's  life. 

The  primary  documents  of  our  religion,  then,  exhibit 
it  as  a  distinctively  Christian  thing  to  believe  in  Jesus 
as  we  believe  in  God  Himself.  Not  only  so,  but  we 
should  not  miss  the  significance  of  the  fact  that  the  writers 
of  the  Xew  Testament  lay  on  this  faith-attitude  an  almost 
exclusive  stress.      On  this  subject  there  is  a  finely  toned 

^  In  the  New  Testament  there  is  no  du[ilication  of  the  object  of  faith. 
The  idea  that  Jesus  was  a  rival  of  the  Father,  or  a  surrogate,  would  of 
course  have  proved  fatal  alike  to  the  inward  coherence  of  the  new  religion 
and  to  its  conflict  with  polytheism.  But  by  the  middle  of  the  second 
century  popular  and  unguarded  language  had  been  used  which  placed  Jesus 
alongside  of  the  Father  as  a  second  God,  anil  in  Gnosticism  a  kindred 
tendency  took  unbridled  forms.  The  contrast  with  the  New  Testament  is 
instructive. 


350  THE    PERSON    OF    JESUS    CHRIST 

passage  in  Eitschl,  which  is  not  merely  interesting  on 
other  grounds,  but  incidentally  does  something  to  relieve 
a  familiar  difficulty.  He  observes  that  in  the  New- 
Testament,  in  spite  of  our  Lord's  new  commandment  of 
love,  only  the  most  sparing  use  is  made  of  the  conception 
of  love  to  Christ.  But  for  this  restraint,  he  urges,  there 
are  good  reasons.  "  As  a  generic  idea  love  to  Christ  is 
more  indefinite  than  faith  in  Him.  The  former  term  leaves 
it  undecided  whether  we  put  ourselves  on  a  level  with 
Christ  or  subordinate  ourselves  to  Him.  But  faitli  in 
Christ  includes  the  confession  of  His  Godhead  and  His 
dominion  over  us,  and  thus  shuts  out  the  possibility  of 
equality  with  Him."  "  This,"  he  adds,  "  is  the  evident  pur- 
pose which  leads  the  Reformers  to  elaborate  the  idea  of  faith 
in  Christ.  If  Christ  takes  the  place  of  God,  faith  in  Him 
is  necessarily  a  kind  of  obedience."^  The  apostolic  point 
of  view  —  religious,  experimental,  immediate  —  could 
scarcely  be  better  expressed  than  in  the  words :  "  Faith 
in  Christ  includes  the  confession  of  His  Godhead."  This 
is  the  implicit  but  inexorable  note  which  runs  through 
the  Christian  message  as  a  whole.  Our  souls  bow  down 
instinctively  before  Jesus,  who  has  saved  us ;  and  in  that 
act  of  homage  His  deity  comes  home  to  us.  It  is  not  a 
matter  of  reasoning  but  of  intuition.  There  is  no  process 
of  logical  conclusion ;  our  eyes  are  opened,  and  we  have 
a  view  of  Christ  which  cannot  be  otherwise  expressed  than 
by  the  confession  of  His  Godhead.  The  New  Testament 
proves  abundantly  that  such  an  experience  is  exactly 
parallel  to  the  normative  experience  of  the  first  disciples. 
We  can  see  that  in  Christ's  influence  upon  them  they 
perceived  the  act  of  God,  drawing  near  in  grace.  It  was 
not  that  they  placed  Jesus  alongside  of  God,  argued  next 
that  God  must  be  like  Jesus,  and  moved  thus  by  syllogism 
from  the  human  appearance  to  the  Divine  reality.  The 
matter  was  much  more  direct,  vital,  and  personal.  His 
power  told  upon  them  overmasteringly,  raising  them  to 
communion  with  the  Highest,  and  breaking  all  the  bands 

^  Justification  ar>d  Reconjiiliat.ion  (Eng.  tr.),  593-94, 


FAITH    AS    GENERATED   TO-DAY  351 

of  sin ;  they  had  accordingly  no  option  but  to  give  Christ 
the  loftiest  place  in  faith,  taking  Him  there  and  then  as 
the  pledge  and  equivalent  of  the  presence  of  God  Himself. 
Everything  grew  up  out  of  the  living  contact  of  Jesus 
with  their  souls ;  all  doctrine  was  but  the  confession  that 
in  that  human  life  God  Himself  was  turning  to  sinners 
and  opening  His  heart  to  them.  Of  course  the  truth  was 
reached  by  slow  degrees.  "  To  the  disciples/'  writes  Pro- 
fessor Cairns,  "Jesus  was  at  first,  perhaps,  simply  man. 
But  as  their  knowledge  of  Him  widened,  and  deepened, 
and  cleared,  the  very  endeavour  to  understand  Him,  to 
make  a  unity  of  their  thoughts  aV)out  Him,  led  them  on 
to  conclusions  about  Him  that  caused  the  spirit  to  thrill 
with  awe  and  wonder,  and  yet  with  joy.  They  became 
aware  of  something  mysterious  and  transcendent  in  Him, 
something  which  was  to  the  human  lineaments  of  the 
Character  what  the  Thought  is  to  the  "Word.  Behind  and 
through  Jesus  they  discerned — God,  and  that  Vision  it  is 
which  causes  the  strange  thrill  and  glow  of  their  later 
writings."  ^ 

In  this  experience  of  slowly  dawning  recognition,  the 
first  disciples  are  surely  the  forerunners  and  exemplars  of 
many  in  our  time.  Indeed  the  situation  of  the  modern 
inquirer  is  in  some  ways  curiously  like  theirs.  They  were 
of  course  confronted  with  no  august  tradition  on  the 
subject  of  Jesus'  person ;  as  yet  doctrine  was  all  to  make : 
the  Subject  of  it  had  to  win  His  way  into  the  sanctuary  of 
faith  by  the  sheer  power  of  a  spiritual  impression.  That 
impression  could  operate  only  by  degrees,  and  while  the 
faith  created  by  it  invoU^ed  a  theology,  it  was  so  far  a 
theology  in  solution,  not  yet  precipitated  in  formulated 
doctrine.  And  once  again  to-day,  for  many  the  tradition 
regarding  Christ  may  be  said  to  be  non-existent.  It  has 
at  least  no  existence  their  minds  can  receive  and  grasp 
when  presented  point-blank  for  their  acceptance  ;  reverence, 
equally  with  candour,  bids  them  refuse  assent  to  theorems 
which  they  have  no  convincing  grounds  for  acknowledging 
^  Christianity  in  the  Modern  World,  155-56. 


352  THE   PERSON    OF   JESUS    CHRIST 

as  true.  Hence  they  come  into  the  presence  of  Jesus  with 
a  fresh,  unbiassed  souL  They  have  as  it  were  regained 
"  the  innocence  of  the  eye " ;  they  can  take  vivid  and 
original  impressions.  For  them  at  all  events — whatever 
may  be  the  case  for  the  Church — truth  about  Jesus  has 
all  to  be  built  up  from  the  foundations.  And  the  spectacle 
of  Jesus  mastering  these  men,  bending  them  before  Him  in 
homage,  admiration,  obedience,  and  finally  lowly  trust  and 
worship,  is  the  ever-renewed  proof,  such  as  doctrine  needs 
and  will  always  find,  that  in  giving  Jesus  the  supreme 
place  our  faith  is  based  on  irrefragable  reality.^ 

It  will  no  doubt  be  rejoined  that  faith  has  many 
varying  stages  of  maturity,  and  that  this  ought  not  to  be 
forgotten  in  a  full  discussion  of  the  position  attributed  to 
Jesus  in  the  Christian  consciousness.  We  may  accept  the 
admonition.  The  place  a  man  gives  to  Christ  is  naturally 
determined  by  the  personal  ascendancy  Christ  has  gained 
over  him  and  the  obligations  under  which  he  feels  Christ 
has  laid  him  as  a  sinner ;  and  in  such  a  region,  plainly, 
there  will  always  be  manifold  and  delicate  gradations. 
In  some  minds  there  may  be  no  more  than  a  dim  feeling 
that  in  Jesus'  presence  life  is  nobler,  clearer,  more 
profound ;  in  others,  the  sense  that  He  is  rightful  Lord  of 
thought  and  conduct,  or  that  He  makes  the  Fatherhood  of 
God  more  real  and  sure,  or  at  a  later  point,  perhaps,  that 

^  Constantly  we  have  need  to  remind  ourselves  that  faith,  in  the 
Christian  sense,  is  no  mere  otiose  acknowledgiiieut  of  worth,  or  appreciative 
recognition,  given  by  us  lightly  or  as  from  above  ;  on  the  contrary,  it  is 
irresistibly  wrung  from  us  by  One  in  whom  all  power  dwells.  The  person 
of  Jesus  wins  complete  dominion  over  us  in  an  experience  which  transforms 
our  lives.  We  feel  ourselves  in  the  hands  of  immeasurable  spiritual  might. 
In  other  words,  faith  is  submission,  cai)itulatian,  obedience  ;  looked  at  as 
an  attitude  lasting  on  in  time,  it  is  loyalty  And  it  is  a  striking  and 
significant  circumstance  that  the  faith  thus  given  to  Christ  is  given  in 
opposition  to  natural  inclination.  Our  first  impulse  is  not  to  submit  but 
to  resent  keenly  the  condemnation  passed  on  our  sinfulness  by  Christ's  mere 
presence,  and  to  reject  with  a  grudging  envy  the  thought  that  He  is  higher 
than  we.  Withal,  faith  is  ethical ;  for  though  "it  is  the  gift  of  God,"  it 
comes  through  the  overmastering  influence  of  a  person  and  the  instru- 
mentality of  the  truth  He  biiugs.  On  the  whole  subject,  see  Herrmann's 
priceless  book.  Communion  viith  God. 


JESUS    AS    SUBJECT    OF    FAITH  353 

life  in  a  universe  which  definitely  negated  Christ  would  be 
unendurable.  These  are  incipient  forms  of  faith,  not  to  be 
ignored  by  one  who  desires  to  know  how  the  Christian 
mind  becomes  Christian.  But  they  are  something  less 
than  faith  in  its  typical  and  characteristic  form.  They  are 
not  equivalent  to  that  attitude  which  in  utter  self-com- 
mittal gives  to  Christ  solemnly  the  predicates  of  Best  and 
Highest,  and  knows  Him  as  living,  present,  and  divinely 
strong  to  save.  Now,  in  analysing  faith,  as  the  fruitful 
soil  of  doctrine,  we  are  obviously  bound  to  choose  its  most 
distinctive  form,  in  which  its  constituent  qualities  and 
content  attain  most  salient  expression.  We  have  to  ask 
what  Christ  is,  not  for  cool  intellectual  criticism,  or  for 
the  historian's  imaginative  sympathy,  or  even  for  the 
movements  of  a  sincere  and  eager  aspiration,  but  for  the 
complete  faith  which  casts  itself  down  into  the  depths  of 
His  grace  as  the  embodied  Holiness  and  Love  of  God. 

The  mistake  of  interrogating  faith  at  one  of  its  lower 
stages,  rather  than  at  the  highest,  appears  to  be  mainly 
responsible  for  the  obstinate  contention  that  Jesus  is  but 
the  Subject  and  Example  of  faith,  not  in  strictness  its 
proper  object.  It  is  a  view  which  has  never  been  wholly 
unrepresented  in  the  Church,  and  it  is  powerfully  and 
widely  advocated  now.  Jesus,  it  is  held,  showed  us  what 
faith  is ;  He  did  not  personally  claim  to  be  "  believed  in." 
He  was  the  prophet  of  an  ideal  higher  than  Himself. 
To  think  otherwise  is  to  indulge  a  venial  but  misleadin<^ 
tenderness  for  tradition.  The  error  of  ascribing  to  Christ 
an  absolute  religious  significance  is  indeed  no  recent  one ; 
already  in  New  Testament  days  the  first  wrong  step  was 
taken.  "  The  disciples,"  says  Albert  Eeville,  "  forgot  the 
distinction  maintained  by  the  Master,  between  the  pure 
religion  which  He  taught  and  exemplified,  and  faith  in  His 
person.  Jesus  Himself,  and  not  the  religious  realities 
which  Jesus  had  revealed  to  the  consciousness,  became  the 
object,  properly  speaking,  of  the  religious  belief."  The 
blame  for  a   change  so  radical  and   so  unfortunate  rests 


354  THE   PERSON    OF   JESUS    CHRIST 

chiefly  with  St.  Paul.  "  He  gave  to  the  person  of  Jesus, 
as  the  object  of  faith,  an  importance  so  absolute,  so 
exclusive,  that  Christianity,  instead  of  remaining  the  faith 
of  Jesus  Christ  became  with  him  decidedly  faith  in  Jesus 
Christ."^  Ever  since  the  Church  has  perpetuated  his 
error.  In  recent  years  this  general  view  has  become  more 
self-confident,  with  the  result  that  in  certain  quarters  the 
Church  is  earnestly  exhorted  to  return,  even  thus  late, 
from  the  "  Gospel  of  Christ "  to  the  more  pure  and 
primitive  "Religion  of  Jesus,"  from  faith  in  the  Son  of 
God,  as  a  transcendent  Saviour,  to  the  religious  beliefs 
which  Jesus  held.^  Is  this  an  appeal  to  which  we  can 
respond  ? 

It  betokens  a  mental  attitude,  clearly,  which  has  much 
affinity  with  the  ideals  of  the  eighteenth  century.  The 
rationalism  of  that  earlier  day  attached  only  minor  im- 
portance to  fellowship  with  God,  and  the  cardinal  truth 
that  salvation  has  reality  only  as  God  takes  the  first  step 
was  not  so  much  denied  as  urbanely  relegated  to  obscurity. 
A  high  place  was  given  to  the  dignity  of  man.  It  was 
felt  that  he  possessed  an  inherent  capacity  to  raise  himself 
toward  God  and  pursue  the  tasks  of  harmonious  self-culture. 
To  inspire  him  for  such  an  enterprise  there  was  needed 
less  a  Eedeemer  than  a  not  too  pre-eminent  Example  and 
Pioneer.  Of  course  in  a  religious  atmosphere  of  this  kind, 
in  which  the  thought  of  man  predominates  over  that  of 
God,  the  question  of  Jesus  as  object  of  faith  has  lost  its 
interest.  The  sense  of  debt  to  Him  is  undermined ;  He 
is  but  primus  inter  pares.  In  wide  circles  the  same 
presuppositions  have  now  regained  currency ;  and  the 
comparative  study  of  religions,  or  at  least  the  principles 
of  research   deemed   necessary  for   its  pursuit,  have  been 

^  History  of  the  Dogma  of  the  Deity  of  Jesus  Christ,  29,  40. 

2  A  recent  frank  expression  of  this  view  is  Heitmiiller's  article,  "Jesus 
Christus,"  in  Die  Religion  in  Geschichte  und  Gegenwart  (1911),  Bd.  iii. 
375  ff.  It  takes  an  extreme  form  in  P.  W.  Schmiedel's  inexplicable  assertion 
{Die  Person  Jesu  im  Streit  der  3Icinungen  dcr  Gegenwart,  1906)  that  his 
religious  life  would  suffer  no  vital  loss  though  it  were  proved  that  Jesus 
never  existed. 


THE    IMMANENT    VIEW    OF    HISTORY  355 

regarded  as  justifyiug  a  certain  partial  displacement  of 
Jesus  from  the  centre  of  tlie  Christian  consciousness. 

History,  it  is  argued,  has  no  place  for  absolute  person- 
alities, yet  such  a  personality  Jesus  must  be  if  men  are 
to  believe  on  Him  in  the  religious  sense.  Past  phenomena 
are  only  relative  at  the  best ;  each  fact  or  process  has  its 
exactly  fixed  place  in  the  uniform  sequence  of  effects  and 
causes.  Its  place  in  the  sequence  makes  it  what  it  is. 
When  this  philosophy  is  confronted  with  Jesus  Christ,  it 
will  evidently  be  under  a  strong  temptation  to  disparage 
His  uniqueness,  not  arbitrarily  but  on  principle.  It  will 
regard  itself  as  obliged  to  show  Him  to  His  place  in  the 
normal  progress  of  events,  and  in  doing  so  to  frown  down 
excited  talk  respecting  an  impassable  difference  between 
Him  and  all  other  children  of  men.  Each  single  fact  is 
the  creature  of  its  conditions ;  as  conditioned,  it  is  and  can 
only  be  relative.  Hence  the  fact  of  Christ  also  is  relative, 
possessing  no  unique  or  indispensable  significance  for  the 
religious  mind.  The  spiritual  content  of  His  life,  the 
impression  stamped  on  the  apostolic  faith,  cannot  be  of 
final  importance  for  the  world.  Doubtless  its  value  is 
great  as  an  index  of  the  Power  on  which  all  things 
depend  ;  it  may  even  be  supreme  among  the  infinitely  varied 
phenomena  by  which  the  great  Noumenon  is  revealed. 
But  only  in  unguarded  moments  can  we  designate  it  as 
absolute.  Por  absolute  facts  there  exists  no  room  in  a 
universe  like  this.  Even  Eitschl  overstepped  the  mark 
in  his  effort  to  exhibit  the  apostolic  view  of  Christ  as 
permanently  normative.  What  the  modern  mind  insists 
upon,  and  needs,  is  not  the  religion  of  the  apostles  but  the 
personal  religion  of  the  apostles'  Master.  He  was  in 
reality  the  first  Christian,  and  we  are  Christians  likewise 
in  so  far  as  we  follow  where  He  led  the  way. 

To  this  we  may  reply,  first  of  all,  that  the  argument 
as  a  whole  rests  on  a  conception  of  the  historic  process 
as  mechanically  uniform  which  is  silently  assumed,  but 
nowhere  substantiated  by  convincing  proof.  This  means 
that  the  emergence  of  a  transcendent  Personality,  claiming 


356  THE    PERSON    OF   JESUS    CHRIST 

faith  and  worthy  to  receive  it,  is  discounted  from  the 
outset,  as  incompatible  with  the  "  laws  "  of  history.  Into 
the  complexities  of  this  theme  we  cannot  enter  here.  But 
it  may  at  least  be  remarked  that  the  policy  advocated  by 
the  radical  theologians  is  one  rather  of  prescribing  con- 
clusions to  life  and  experience  than  of  accepting  whatever 
fresh  revelations  may  be  conveyed  through  the  medium  of 
fact.  After  all,  if  a  transcendent  Person  should  emerge, 
it  is  essential  that  He  be  acknowledged.  It  betrays  a 
disabling  bondage  to  (i  'priori  dogma,  therefore,  none  the 
less  hurtful  that  it  is  unorthodox,  when  men  approach  a 
stupendous  problem  with  the  tacit  understanding  that  no 
results  can  be  accepted  which  fail  to  conform  to  a  fixed 
standard.  To  be  told  in  advance  how  much  you  may 
believe  is  always  depressing,  and  the  implied  attitude  is 
moreover  not  one  which  encourages  the  hope  that  the 
greatest  things  in  Christianity  will  be  handled  with  the 
requisite  sympathy  and  understanding.  Yet  the  historic 
faith  in  Christ,  as  the  only-begotten  Son,  has  achieved 
results  in  the  consolation  and  renewal  of  human  lives 
which  justify  it,  if  we  may  put  it  so,  in  asking  a  reverential 
treatment  at  the  hands  of  theories  which  have  no  such 
agelong  record  behind  them. 

Again,  it  is  noticeable  that  while  the  advocates  of  the 
so-called  "  Jesus  religion "  employ  the  fundamental  prin- 
ciples of  Uniformity  and  Eelativity  to  veto  His  unique 
transcendence,  they  yet  affirm  other  cardinal  truths  with 
which  these  principles  are  equally  incompatible.  An 
instance  will  make  this  clear.  Eeligion  is  definable  as 
fellowship  with  God,  and  this  fellowship  has  no  reality 
apart  from  prayer.  Now  to  the  writers  under  review 
Jesus  is  no  longer  supernatural.  The  supernatural  as  such 
has  been  discarded  once  for  all.  Yet  it  is  surely  obvious 
that  prayer — the  vital  breath  of  religion,  as  they  truly 
hold — is  itself  a  completely  supernatural  thing  which 
shatters  the  monistic  conception  of  the  world  as  an 
inviolable  system  of  mechanical  causation.  Prayer,  in 
other  words,  has  no  meaning  if  the  world  is  a  complex  of 


PRAYER    AND    MONISM  357 

rigidly  determined  forces,  acting  and  reacting  in  pre- 
ordained ways.  When  we  pray,  we  implicitly  declare 
our  faith  that  the  mesh  work  of  cosmic  energies  is  the 
instrument  of  a  loving  Will  not  confined  by  their  limits  or 
exhausted  in  their  effects,  but  capable  of  utilising  them  for 
sovereign  and  gracious  ends.  The  devout  heart,  that  is, 
assumes  that  reality  contains  transcendent  factors  ;  when 
we  pray,  God  is  freely  communing  with  us,  and  leading  us 
to  commune  with  Him.  The  world  is  built  on  such  lines 
as  to  admit  thus  of  creative  and  original  events.^  Hence, 
in  the  light  of  prayer  as  an  experience,  it  is  vain  to  speak 
of  an  unchanging  and  inviolable  world- process,  reducing  all 
things  to  one  undistinguished  level  of  uniform  relativity, 
and  excluding  inter  alia  the  gift  of  a  new,  infinite,  un- 
precedented Personality,  in  whom  sinners  may  believe. 
That  is  a  false  pre-conception  with  which  personal 
religion  can  hold  no  terms.  But  a  universe  in  which 
real  prayer  is  possible  has  abundant  room  for  a  tran- 
scendent Saviour. 

Once  more,  in  the  creed  of  this  group  of  thinkers 
the  forgiveness  of  sin  retains  a  central  place.  They 
are  sure  that  God  receives  sinners  ;  on  no  subject  do 
they  speak  with  a  more  passionate  or  infectious  thrill. 
"We  must  not  hesitate,"  says  Bousset,  "to  acknowlege 
that  this  is  the  highest  and  final  point  in  our  faith  in 
God  when  we  can  accept  and  conceive  God  as  the  God 
who  forgives  sins."^  As  regards  this  element  in  the 
radical  view  of  the  Gospel  two  observations  may  be 
made. 

In  the  first  place,  forgiveness  also  is  a  transcendent 
supernatural  reality.  It  is  accomplished  by  a  transcendent 
God  ;  it  is  something  to  which  neither  nature  nor  humanity 
is  equal.  In  the  soul  of  a  pardoned  man,  as  he  well 
knows,  a  change  has  happened  which  is  inexplicable  by  the 
mere  action  of  immanent  psychological  forces.  What  has 
happened  is  that  the  burden  of  sin — of  sin  that  is  ours 

*  Cf.  Wendland,  Miracles  and  Christianity,  ch.  vu. 

*  Faith  of  a  Protestant,  101. 


358  THE    PERSON    OF   JESUS    CHRIST 

and  that  cleaves  to  us  with  the  warning  that  it  will  be 
ours  for  ever — is  lifted  of!',  and  we  are  drawn  back  in  love 
to  the  Father's  heart.  The  gates  of  righteousness,  which 
seemed  closed  against  us  eternally,  are  set  open  once  again. 
God  forgives  ;  none  but  God  can  forgive  ;  and  when  in 
this  creative  fashion  He  removes  the  power  of  sin  to  expel 
us  from  His  presence,  the  act  is  one  to  which  the  normal 
processes  of  phenomenal  reality  are  instrumental,  but  no 
more.  As  such  an  act  it  involves  infinitely  more  than 
cosmic  relations  of  invariable  sequence.  It  brings  God 
Himself  into  a  man's  life  in  an  immediate  (yet  not 
unmediated)  way  and  establishes  a  new  connection  in 
which  He  and  that  life  shall  henceforth  stand  to  one 
another.  The  forgiveness  of  God,  imparted  to  us  in  His 
sovereign  love,  is  a  deliverance  from  the  necessities  and 
fatalities  of  evil  in  which  science  and  history  seem  to 
involve  us.  It  is  the  experience  in  which  we  really 
become  persons — not  things,  nor  links  in  a  chain,  but  free 
men.  Doubtless  the  men  of  to-day  are  gravely  tempted 
to  doubt  the  possibility  of  pardon,  especially  if  they  have 
felt  the  influence  of  that  sombre  naturalistic  pessimism 
which  haunts  the  modern  mind,  bidding  the  guilty  endure 
their  fate,  as  best  they  may,  with  dumb  brave  stoicism. 
But  in  unnumbered  lives  all  these  misgivings  have  vanished 
in  the  presence  of  Jesus  Christ.  Fact  has  proved  too 
strong  for  necessitarian  logic.  The  man  to  whom  pardon 
has  become  real  knows  once  for  all  that  within  and  above 
cosmic  law  there  is  a  Father,  that  he  is  faced  by  no  mere 
silent  impersonal  tendencies  but  by  the  living  God  Himself, 
who  puts  forth  His  hand  to  meet  and  grasp  ours,  ushering 
us  through  forgiveness  into  a  new  and  blessed  world  of 
good.  Here,  then,  once  more  the  deepest  things  of  experi- 
ence compel  us  to  break  with  the  conception  of  a 
mechanically  determined  system  of  law  (except,  as  it  has 
been  put,  as  "  a  scientifically  useful  fiction  ").  In  forgive- 
ness, as  formerly  in  the  case  of  prayer,  we  find  ourselves 
in  contact  with  a  universe  not  really  interpretable  as  a 
closed  circle  of  forces,  all  the   changes  in  which  can  be 


FORGIVENESS    AND    MONISM  359 

computed  in  advance  by  a  mind  sufficiently  powerful.  It 
is  a  universe  rather  whose  apparent  iron  uniformity  is 
but  a  fragment  of  the  whole.  God  is  a  free  spirit,  able 
to  bring  events  to  pass  which  transcend  all  finite  forces 
acting  with  mechanical  rigour,  able  to  release  into  the 
phenomenal  order  the  pent-up  fulness  of  His  own  Divine 
activity.  Eeality  is  rich,  plastic,  full  of  unimaginable 
potentialities.  It  is  susceptible  of  new  departures,  and  the 
preferential  action  of  God  affects  its  movement  by  way 
of  real  initiation.  What  this  implies  for  our  argument 
is  tolerably  clear.  It  implies  that  no  d  priori  ground 
exists  for  asserting  it  to  be  impossible  that  history — the 
scene  of  the  original  and  unparalleled — may  exhibit  the 
figure  of  a  supernatural  Eedeemer  as  far  superior  to  normal 
manhood  as  man  is  to  the  animals.  Whether  such  a 
Person  actually  exists  is  of  course  a  question  to  be  decided 
ultimately  by  spiritual  conviction,  not  by  considerations 
of  philosophic  theory.  But  if  He  is  real,  if  we  are  aware 
that  in  Him  God  is  touching  us  and  bringing  us  to  com- 
munion with  Himself,  He  is  thereby  constituted  the 
object  of  religious  faith  in  the  proper  sense.  For  to 
"  believe  "  in  Christ  is  simply  to  confess  that  in  Him  we 
find  God. 

Not  only  so.  The  "  Jesus  religion,"  in  the  sense 
under  review,  is  a  religion  of  unclouded  fellowship  with 
the  Father ;  but  if  the  presupposition  that  this  relation  of 
fellowship  is  mediated  by  Jesus  be  withdrawn,^  it  becomes 
a  problem  of  the  utmost  gravity  how  sinful  men  can  attain 
to  it.  To  speak  as  if  without  more  ado  we  could  adopt 
Jesus'  undimmed  filial  consciousness  is  to  play  with  words. 
How  shall  we  copy  on  our  own  account  His  felt  union 
with  God  ?  How  shall  we  venture  to  say  with  Him  :  "  All 
things  are  delivered  unto  Me  of  the  Father"?      It  is  not 

*  According  to  Weinel  [Jesus  im  neunzchntfn  Jdhrhundert,  284  ff.), 
Jesus  never  regarded  Himself  as  fulfilling  a  mediatorial  function,  for  He 
knew  that  no  mediator  was  required.  For  a  brief  interesting  account  of 
Troeltsch's  similar  view  of  Clirist,  see  the  Eeport  of  the  Fifth  Inteniatiorial 
Congress  of  Free  Chridianlly,  237  ff. 


360  THE   PERSON    OF   JESUS    CHRIST 

possible.  The  confusion  at  this  point  is  probably  owing 
to  a  misinterpretation  of  the  fact  that  the  religious 
man  longs  for  union  with  God.  His  deepest  yearning  is 
for  the  life  of  unclouded  sonship.  But  longing  manifestly 
is  not  possession ;  desire  comes  short  of  perfect  and  secure 
fulfilment.  In  fidelity  to  the  facts  we  are  obliged  to 
recognise  a  difference  of  type  between  the  filial  conscious- 
ness of  Jesus  and  our  own. 

If  then  we  are  summoned  not  to  have  faith  in  Jesus 
but  to  share  the  faith  He  had,  our  reply  is  that  the  demand 
is  one  which  of  ourselves  we  cannot  satisfy.  Its  point 
of  view  is  sentimental  rather  than  religious  ;  for  senti- 
mentalism  is  the  mood  whose  eyes  are  closed  persistently 
to  vital  facts.  And  here  the  vital  facts  are  incontestable. 
For  one  thing,  Jesus'  communion  with  God  was  a  secret  of 
His  own  soul ;  but  so  far  as  He  revealed  it  openly,  we  can 
see  it  to  be  quite  inimitable  by  us.  His  relation  to  the 
Father  was  immediate  ;  ours,  as  He  taught,  is  only  in  and 
through  Him.  Moreover,  the  consciousness  of  sin  leads  us 
to  crave  a  ground  of  confidence  external  to  self  in  our 
approach  to  God.  Had  we  been  sinless,  some  reason  there 
might  be  in  the  modern  invitation  bidding  us  believe  like 
Jesus  rather  than  in  Him,  but,  irrespective  of  other  con- 
siderations, the  single  quality  of  guilt  is  enough  to  debar 
us  from  the  assumption  of  religious  independence  on  a 
par  with  His.  The  obstacle  is  insuperable  from  our  side, 
and  it  is  final.  If  we  are  to  reach  that  inner  sanctuary, 
we  must  be  led  thither  by  One  who  is  Himself  in  perfect 
and  uninterrupted  union  with  the  Father,  and  who  in  love 
manifests  and  seals  the  Father's  purpose  to  a  world  of  sin. 
A  convincing  and  intelligible  presentation  of  God  is  required 
which  will  turn  our  fear  into  glad  confidence.  We  have 
need  of  such  a  revealing  fact — which  can  only  be  a  personal 
Life — as  will  exert  upon  us  an  inward  compulsion,  and 
give  us  in  a  moral  experience  the  certainty  of  God's 
redeeming  nearness.  It  is  because  men  in  every  age  have 
found  this  in  Jesus  that  they  have  put  faith  in  Him  as 
God  apprehensible  by  man. 


JESUS'    FAITH,    AND    FAITH    IN    JESUS  361 

The  suggostiou  that  the  "  religion  of  Jesus  "  represents 
the  essence  of  Christianity  may  be  dismissed  as  an  im- 
pressionist and  superficial  error.  It  rests  at  bottom  on 
a  quite  inadequate  conce}ttion  of  what  is  required  in  a 
faith  which  shall  not  only  admonish  but  redeem.  Historic- 
ally it  is  without  foundation.  Christianity  emerges  in 
history  as  faith  in  Jesus  the  Christ — a  fact  now  admitted 
by  all  scholars,  of  whatever  type.  What  we  call  Christian 
piety  appeared  first  in  the  world  not  as  a  characteristic  of 
the  mind  of  Jesus,  but  as  the  distinctive  relig-ious  attitude 
of  His  disciples.  He  bad  indeed  a  vital  and  indispensable 
connection  with  faith,  but  as  regards  the  precise  nature  of 
that  connection  there  can  be  no  dispute.  He  was  faith's 
creator,  not  its  mere  illustration.  He  evoked  it,  but  He 
did  not  exemplify  its  specific  quality  of  penitent  self- 
renunciation.  He  made  no  effort  to  propagate  in  the  souls 
of  His  disciples  an  exact  reproduction  of  His  own  filial 
consciousness ;  they  were  not  and  could  not  be  sons  in 
the  precise  sense  of  His  peculiar  Sonship.  Only  once 
were  the  words  uttered,  "  No  man  knoweth  the  Father 
save  the  Son,  and  he  to  whomsoever  the  Son  willeth  to 
reveal  Him,"  and  they  can  never  be  repeated.  No 
prophet  or  apostle  has  dared  to  take  them  on  his  lips. 
And  if  it  stands  condemned  by  history,  the  modern  hypo- 
thesis is  still  less  convincing  for  religion.  It  is  an 
impossible  Gospel  for  the  sinful.  To  approach  God  as 
Jesus  did,  with  all  His  directness  and  serenity  of  feeling, 
but  without  His  mediation,  is  an  enterprise  totally  beyond 
our  powers.  If  the  Gospel  becomes  a  demand  for  a  faith 
like  that  of  Jesus,  how  does  it  differ  from  a  new  Judaism  ? 
It  is  no  more  a  great  Divine  gift,  but  an  additional  load 
for  men  whose  hands  already  sink  in  weakness  and  despair. 
To  invite  us  to  the  task  is  to  plunge  in  darkness  all  whose 
conscience  is  alive,  and  who  refuse  to  ignore  the  self- 
estimate  they  are  irresistibly  impelled  to  form  in  Jesus' 
presence.  From  this  hopeless  situation  we  escape  only 
as  our  eyes  are  opened  to  behold  in  Jesus  one  whom 
we  receive  and  rest  upon  for  salvation.      He  is  the  revela- 


362  THE    PERSON    OF    JESUS    CHRIST 

tion,  as  Herrmann  puts  it,  "  that  conquers  every  doubt. 
Our  yearning  to  meet  a  personal  life  that  shall  resolve 
every  element  of  separation  between  us  and  it  into  pure 
trust,  and  thus  give  our  spirits  a  home,  is  the  longing  for 
the  living  God.  But  we  find  it  satisfied  in  Jesus  in  every 
moment  when  the  recollection  of  Him  takes  away  our  fear 
of  the  abyss,  and  delivers  us  from  the  confusion  and 
perplexity  of  the  evil  conscience."  ^ 

*  Communion  with  God,  141-42. 


CHAPTER   V. 

THE  EXALTED  LORD. 

In  the  previous  chapter  we  embarked  upon  a  detailed 
scrutiny  of  the  immediate  utterances  of  faith  regarding 
Christ,  and  there  emerged  the  fundamental  conviction 
that  He  is  Himself  the  object  of  saving  trust.  Faith  in 
God  as  Father  is  rooted  firmly  in  the  faith  which  appre- 
hends Christ  as  Son,  This  result  must  now  be  defined 
with  more  exactness.  The  Christ  thus  apprehended  is  in 
fact  the  transcendent  or  exalted  Lord. 

At  various  points  the  conclusion  has  been  forced  upon 
us,  that  within  the  New  Testament  the  proper  object  of 
faith  is  not  the  historic  Jesus,  but  the  Lord  who  lives 
to  bless  and  rule.^  True,  this  full-grown  belief  could  not 
be  reached  at  a  single  bound ;  preparatory  stages  led  to 
it ;  yet  they  were  after  all  merely  provisional  and  intro- 
ductory. The  faith  of  the  disciples  differs  by  a  wide 
remove  from  that  of  the  apostles.  The  attitude  of  His 
followers  to  Jesus  prior  to  the  crucifixion,  notwithstanding 
its  revolutionary  significance,  is  not  so  far  the  distinctive 
attitude  of  Christians  to  their  Lord.  A  new  era  opens 
with  the  resurrection.  Certainly  the  risen  Christ  is  the 
same   person  as  formerly,  otherwise   the  apostolic  gospel, 

I>iTEHATrRE— Swete,  The  J2^ostlcs'  Creed,  1894  ;  Kaftan,  Dorjmatift^, 
1909;  Milligan,  Ascension  and  Heavenly  Priesthood  of  our  Lord,  1892; 
von  Dobschiitz,  Ostern  und  Pfingsten,  1903;  Meyer,  Die  Aiiferslehung 
Chrisii,  1905;  Zdtschrift  fur  Theologie  und  Kirche,  1897-98;  Weudt, 
System  der  chridlichen  Lehre,  1907  ;  Schlatter,  Das  christliche  Dogma, 
1911  ;  Garvie,  Studies  in  the  Inner  Life  of  Jesus,  1907  ;  J.  Weiss,  Die 
Nachfolge  C'hristi,  1895. 

1  Cf.  Lohstein's  finely  toned  article,  "Der  evangelische  Heilsglaube  an 
die  Auferstehuug  Christi,"  ZTK,  1892,  342  ff. 

363 


364  THE   PERSON    OF   JESUS    CHRIST 

devoid  of  a  point  d'apptii  in  history,  would  have  become 
inept,  since  no  one  can  preach  a  great  Unknown,  or  ask 
for  loyalty  to  a  formula.  At  the  same  time  Christ  is 
now  regarded  in  a  light  so  new  and  all-transmuting  that 
old  terms  of  description  become  inadequate.  The  Man 
of  Sorrows  bears  the  Name  which  is  above  every  name ; 
He  is  the  First  and  the  Last ;  in  Him  dwells  the  fulness 
of  the  Godhead.  It  is  not  survival  merely  in  a  figurative 
sense  whereby  He  persists  "  in  lives  made  better  by  His 
presence,"  with  the  posthumous  influence  of  the  saint ; 
the  power  of  His  resurrection  reveals  itself  as  a  present 
and  universal  activity,  a  reality  on  which  men  lean,  and 
to  which  they  appeal  in  prayer.  He  gives  a  Divine  life 
within  the  soul,  and  He  sustains  it.  Union  with  Him, 
not  assent  to  doctrine,  is  redemption.  This  is  the  dis- 
tinctively Christian  attitude  to  Christ,  as  it  appears  in 
the  New  Testament ;  and  unless  the  records  are  of  no 
value,  it  represents  an  estimate  and  a  mode  of  behaviour 
evoked  in  believers  by  the  appearances  of  the  risen  Lord 
and  the  subsequent  manifestation  of  the  Spirit. 

It  is  an  attitude,  moreover,  which  has  been  perpetu- 
ated in  the  Church.  Wendt,  who  holds  no  brief  for 
orthodoxy,  has  said  truly  that  faith  in  Christ  as  risen 
involves  tliese  four  definite  propositions :  first,  He  lives 
really,  not  in  the  memory  of  disciples  only ;  second,  He 
lives  personally,  not  as  an  entity  now  resolved  into  its 
ultimate  constituents  ;  third.  He  lives  in  heaven,  not  in 
the  region  of  the  dead ;  finally,  He  lives  in  the  fullest 
possession  of  blessedness  and  power.^  An  impressive 
type  of  religion  may  no  doubt  subsist  on  less  than  this, 
but  the  typically  Christian  mind  has  always  felt  that  for 
the  triumphant  discharge  of  her  mission  to  humanity  the 
Church  depends  on  the  real  presence  of  her  Lord,  gracious, 
omnipotent,  eternal.  Faith's  object  must  be  now  and 
here.  Past  incidents  may  have  been  crammed  with 
meaning  for  onlookers,  but  unless  they  point  to  a  reality 
which    does    not    pass,    and     with     which    we    can    have 

1  System,  399. 


FAITH    LOOKS    UPWARD,    NOT    BACKWARD    ONLY     365 

immediate  (though  by  no  means  unmediated)  relations, 
they  have  no  more  importance  for  the  modern  mind 
than  the  notes  of  a  bank  long  since  extinct.  Belief  in 
the  continued  presence  of  Christ,  therefore,  is  in  no  way 
the  result  of  argument,  though  it  may  be  argumentatively 
defended ;  it  is  an  instinct  of  the  Christian  soul,  compar- 
able in  depth  and  clearness,  in  many  instances,  to  belief 
in  the  reality  of  an  external  world.  Further,  that  it  is 
no  hallucination  may  be  gathered  not  only  from  its 
ministration  to  the  noblest  type  of  character,  but  from  its 
harmony  with  Jesus'  mind  and  promise.  On  the  eve  of 
death,  He  bade  the  disciples  anticipate  a  future  which 
should  be  marked  not  by  decay  and  impoverishment  but 
by  fuller  victory,  because  inspired  by  His  unseen  guidance, 
and  in  which  therefore  greater  achievements  were  possible 
than  even  during  His  own  life.  One  can  perceive,  indeed, 
that  much  of  the  composure  with  which  the  evangelists 
record  the  limitations  of  knowledge  or  power  observable 
in  the  historic  Jesus  is  owing  to  their  profound  realisation 
of  the  fact  that  the  earthly  ministry  was  but  the  first 
chapter  of  a  career  which  merged  at  last  in  universal 
glory  and  dominion.  In  view  of  the  denouement,  they 
could  afford  to  be  entirely  candid. 

The  conception  of  union  with  Christ  gathers  these 
impressions  into  one  and  articulates  their  meaning.  It 
represents  all  believers  as  joined  to  the  Lord  in  a  spiritual 
fellowship  of  life,  in  a  union  not  mediated  outwardly  by 
rite  or  ceremony,  but  produced  and  sustained  by  self- 
abandoning  trust  in  a  living  Person.  All  this,  which  is 
not  theology  but  religion,  has  obviously  no  meaning  what- 
soever save  as  implying  the  reality  of  a  Saviour  raised 
above  limits  of  time  and  space.  jMen  could  not  be  thus 
intimately  one  with  a  Life  that  was,  but  is  not.  No  fact 
which  has  ceased  to  be  can  form  their  link  with  God. 
Hence  we  may  supplement  the  results  of  the  last  chapter 
by  asserting  that  if  Christology  is  to  reproduce  the 
Christian  certainty,  it  must  define  faith  in  Jesus  as  faith 
in  Him  as  the  living  and  transcendent  Lord. 


366  THE   PERSON    OF   JESUS    CHRIST 

To  certain  minds  this  may  well  appear  a  reactionary 
and  perverse  appeal  to  orthodox  tradition.  Tradition, 
however,  has  comparatively  little  to  do  with  it.  In 
great  measure  orthodoxy  is  a  question  solely  for  expert 
theologians,  no  one  else  knowing  precisely  what  ortho- 
doxy is.  But  the  layman  too  has  fixed  beliefs,  of  which 
a  brief  and  lucid  compendium  may  be  found  in  the  best 
Christian  hymns.  And  any  one  who  is  at  pains  to 
analyse  the  doctrinal  implications  of  an  ancient  hymn 
like  the  Te  Deicm,  or  a  modern  hymn  like  "  Jesu,  Lover 
of  my  soul,"  may  satisfy  himself  as  to  the  futility  of 
supposing  that  bare  reverence  for  tradition  inspires  the 
Church's  affirmation  of  Christ's  perpetual  presence.  What 
faith  longs  for,  and  is  assured  of  possessing,  is  the  en- 
lightenment, direction,  power,  and  consolation  ministered 
by  One  who  Himself  passed  by  the  ways  of  human  life, 
and  in  the  veiled  place  where  He  dwells  on  high  is  not 
unmindful  of  His  followers'  need.  The  men  and  women 
who  made  Christian  history  have  been  animated  by  the 
faith  that  the  exalted  Lord  can  make  the  limitless  re- 
sources of  His  transcendence  available  for  the  humblest  of 
the  saints.  If  by  sympathy  He  shares  their  pain,  they 
also  share  in  the  blessedness  of  His  life  with  God. 

Of  this  conviction  the  most  natural  and  explicit 
sign  is  the  offering  of  prayer  directly  to  Christ.  From 
the  very  outset  a  synonym  for  "  believers  "  was  "  all  that 
call  upon  the  name  of  our  Lord  Jesus  Christ."  ^  The 
practice  is  one  from  which  many  recoil,  on  the  ground 
that  prayer  to  God  in  Jesus'  name,  and  this  only,  is 
normally  Christian.  But  the  New  Testament,  while 
corroborating  their  main  principle,  does  not  appear  to 
justify  the  inference  they  have  drawn.  The  self-restraint 
and  what  may  be  called  the  spiritual  tact  of  the  apostles 
in  this  domain  are  manifest,  yet  we  can  perceive  both 
that  they  prayed  to  Christ  and  that  when  they  did  so  it 
was  not  because  they  regarded  Him  as  nearer  to  them- 
selves and  of  a  more  compassionate  sympathy  than  God 

1 1  Co  P. 


PRAYER   TO    CHRIST  367 

the  Father,  but  because  God  and  Christ  are  utterly  and 
wholly  one.  Thus  every  petition  after  all  is  "  to  the 
glory  of  God  the  Father."  How  vital  this  undertone  is, 
Herrmann  has  shown.  "  Prayer  to  Christ,"  he  writes,  "  is 
a  very  delicate  matter.  It  may  very  easily  be  misused. 
Hence  its  use  is  by  no  means  a  sign  of  special  maturity 
and  clearness  of  belief.  It  is  in  general  true  prayer  only 
when  for  the  Christian  at  the  moment  of  prayer  every 
difference  between  the  Person  of  Jesus  and  the  One 
personal  God  is  done  away.  He  who  truly  prays  must 
be  conscious  that  he  is  raised  inwardly  to  the  One 
personal  Spirit  apart  from  whom  there  is  no  God.  If 
prayer  to  Christ  be  not  elevation  to  this  God,  it  is  no 
Christian  prayer."  ^  Christ,  that  is,  represents  to  faith 
simply  God  Himself  come  forth  for  our  salvation,  and  to 
speak  to  Him  in  prayer  is  to  commune  in  adoring  trust 
with  One  made  known  to  us  in  a  love  and  power  that 
passes  knowledge.  It  is  the  nature  of  faith  as  such  to 
be  in  contact  with  ultimate  reality,  and  since  for  faith 
Jesus  and  God  are  inseparably  one,  prayer,  which  is 
faith's  vital  expression,  must  apprehend  both  in  a  single 
indivisible  act  and  movement  of  adoration. 

Every  one  familiar  with  modern  literature  about  Jesus 
is  aware  that  much  of  it  presents  a  conception  opposed 
to  this  in  most  cardinal  features.  It  is  not  denied 
that  in  a  real  sense  our  relation  to  God  is  mediated  by 
Christ,  yet  it  is  a  Christ  whose  direct  influence  on  men 
ceased  at  death.  On  a  few  minds  He  left  an  impression 
so  profound  that  we  can  still  touch  Him  through  tradition 
and  institution,  and  in  multitudes  of  souls  His  image  is 
even  now  engraved.  He  lives,  as  others  do,  in  the  work 
He  accomplished ;  He  conveyed  to  men  the  content  of 
His  own  spiritual  life.      But  He  does  not  act  on  us  from 

^  Worum  handcU  es  sich  in  dem  Streit  um  das  Apostolikum,  1 2  (quoted 
by  Mozley,  Ritschlianism,  190)  ;  cf.  J.  "Weiss,  Die  Nachfolge  Christi, 
156-58,  and  a  very  full  and  balanced  statement  in  Thieme,  Von  der  Oottheit 
Christi,  52-65. 


368  THE    PERSON    OF   JESUS    CHRIST 

the  unseen.  In  the  natural  poetry  of  faith  we  may 
speak  as  though  He  did,  but  it  is  poetry,  not  fact.  His 
presence  is  departed,  though  we  can  drink  in  the  spirit  of 
His  words  and  thus  indirectly  have  communion  with  His 
mind.  Does  this  afford  a  sufficient  basis  for  specifically 
Christian  life  ? 

Take  the  assertion  that  the  direct  influence  of  Jesus 
terminated  at  the  crucifixion — what  does  it  imply  ?  This 
at  least,  surely,  that  His  earthly  disciples  received  an 
impression  of  His  significance  more  deeply  and  intensely 
personal  than  any  now  available.  At  death  His  influence 
was  reduced  in  ways  never  to  be  compensated.  Doubtless 
to  His  own  mind  it  might  seem  expedient  that  He  should 
go  away  and  come  again  as  an  immediate  personal  activity, 
in  the  Spirit  which  should  touch  men  with  a  quickening 
power  and  transform  their  souls ;  but  His  recorded  ex- 
pressions on  this  subject,  we  are  told,  are  the  ardent  but 
unauthorised  offspring  of  religious  fancy.  Now  to  such  a 
plea  it  may  surely  be  replied  that  life  can  only  be  im- 
parted by  a  living  Person.  Even  Christ's  words,  apart 
from  Christ  Himself,  are  powerless  to  change  men. 
Moreover,  it  gravely  modifies  our  impression  of  Jesus' 
incomparable  greatness  if  it  be  ascertained  that  He  passed 
out  of  contact  with  His  people.  If  like  all  others  He 
was  forced  to  acknowledge  death's  separating  power,  and 
to  commit  the  future  of  His  cause  to  the  influence  of 
evaporating  reminiscence,  how  dubious  and  partial  His 
victory !  Is  this,  in  sober  truth,  a  supposition  which 
will  account  for  the  felt  power  of  Christ  to  regenerate 
and  transfigure — an  efficacy  of  moral  redemption  which 
the  experience  of  consecrated  missionaries  proves  to  be 
acting  on  the  world  to-day  on  an  unprecedented  scale  ? 
The  writers  of  the  New  Testament  are  surely  more  con- 
vincing when  they  tell  us  that  the  method  of  Divine 
revelation  after  Jesus'  death  continued  to  be  in  essence 
what  it  had  been  formerly.  In  the  days  of  His  flesh 
Jesus  made  God  known  through  His  personal  humanity 
in  such    modes  that    thenceforth    the    revelation    became 


THE  INFLUENCE  OF  A  PRESENT  LORD     369 

inseparalile  from  its  human  medium.  The  same  Jesus, 
inhabiting  now  a  sphere  in  which  His  influence  is  uni- 
versalised,  continues  to  reveal  the  Father  and  to  bestow 
a  regenerating  life  through  the  instrumentality  of  His 
own  personal  impression.  We  can  still  be  united  to  Him 
through  faith.  On  this  view,  the  Divine  working  has 
been  marked  by  "continuity  at  each  stage.  Throughout, 
the  living  Person  of  Jesus  is  the  ultimate  force  in  Christi- 
anity. Its  real  content  and  power  are  dissipated  if  it 
be  cut  loose  from  an  immediate  relationship  with  Him, 
mere  teaching,  preserved  in  books  or  traditions,  being 
substituted  for  the  life-giving  influence  of  a.  present  Lord. 

Difficult  then  as  belief  in  the  continued  activity  of 
Christ  may  be,  for  the  Christian  its  negation  is  involved 
in  graver  difficulties  still.  It  is  not  merely  that  God 
has  kept  Christ's  memory  fresh  and  living.  It  is  that 
Christ  has  been  exalted  a  Prince  and  Saviour.  On  any 
other  view  our  Lord  was  totally  in  the  dark  concerning 
the  future  of  His  cause,  for  it  is  certain  that  He 
anticipated  His  spiritual  presence  with  believing  men 
until  the  end.  The  proffer  of  this  unseen  companionship 
invariably  formed  part  of  the  Christian  message.  That 
He  was  mistaken  in  an  anticipation  which  has  been 
abundantly  fulfilled  in  saintly  experience,  becomes  more 
incredible  as  the  question  is  considered.  Error  is  not 
thus  the  fruitful  soil  of  triumph.  Only  the  Living  can 
prevail.  Those  who  shrink  from  impeaching  the  provi- 
dential course  of  the  world  will  feel  that  grounds  more 
convincing  than  any  yet  put  forward  are  required  to  prove 
that  He  who  so  taught  and  wrought  in  the  power  of 
God  has  withdrawn  into  silence  and  inaction,  as  an  idle, 
if  interested,  spectator  of  the  progress  of  the  task  He 
inaugurated  on  the  earth. ^ 

To  the  Christian  consciousness,  then,  Jesus  is  exalted 
as  ever-present  and  almighty,  or,  in  the  profoundly  signifi- 
cant word  of  the  New  Testament,  He  is  "  Lord  "  (Kvpio<{). 

'  Of.  Garvie,  Studies  in  the  Inner  Life  of  Jesus,  459. 
24 


370  THE    PERSON    OF   JESUS    CHRIST 

His  interposition  was  no  transitory  episode,  but  has 
become  by  its  transcendence  an  eternal  and  all-determining 
factor  in  the  relationship  of  God  to  man.  To  apprehend 
this  is  in  essence  to  know  what  the  apostles  mean  by 
Lordship.  In  the  declaration  of  St.  Peter  that  "  this  Jesus 
whom  ye  crucified,  God  hath  made  Lord  and  Christ " 
(Ac  2^*^),  the  phrase  defines  Him  explicitly  as  sovereign 
in  the  spheres  both  of  grace  and  nature.  Of  grace  first, 
be  it  noted,  of  nature  by  way  of  consequence.  This  is  the 
real  order  in  which  the  truth  is  mediated  to  faith,  and 
in  which  alone  it  is  charged  with  spiritual  power.  We 
first  recognise  Christ  as  Lord  within  the  range  of  indi- 
vidual personal  life,  and  expand  this  initial  assurance  later  to 
universal  and  absolute  dimensions.  It  has  been  attempted 
to  distinguish  the  power  of  the  exalted  Christ,  exercised 
solely  for  redemptive  ends,  from  the  sheer  metaphysical 
omnipotence  of  God ;  ^  but  the  distinction  is  untenable. 
In  view  of  the  indivisible  unity  of  the  cosmos,  it  is  futile 
to  represent  the  sway  of  Christ  as  embracing  the  Church 
but  not  the  total  universe.  No  partition  of  influence 
is  conceivable.  To  exclude  even  a  portion  of  reality  from 
His  dominion  is  to  suggest  such  an  eventual  dualism  as 
must  become  intolerable  both  to  faith  and  reason.  At 
the  same  time  His  sovereignty  bears  peculiarly  upon  the 
Church  in  so  far  as  the  believers  who  compose  the  Church 
are  conscious  of  and  responsive  to  His  perfect  will.  His 
supreme  aims  thus  being  realised  by  their  instrumentality. 
His  purpose  prevails  not  by  abrupt  fiat,  but  through  the 
mediation  of  saved  men. 

The  resurrection  of  Christ  marks  the  point  at  which 
this  sovereign  power  was  first  made  effective.  Through 
a  vast  resulting  expansion  of  activity  the  Son  then  became 
indistinguishable  from  the  Father  in  the  sense  that  He 
is  now  possessed  of  power  to  realise  in  human  lives 
a  salvation  which  is  union  with  God  Himself.  Tradi- 
tional theology  largely  obliterated  this  aspect  of  the 
resurrection  as  a  "  crisis  "  in  the  constitution  of  Christ's 
^  For  instance  by  Bovon,  Dogmatique  Chrdlienne,  ii.  167  f. 


THE   CRISIS    OF   THE    RESURRECTION  371 

person — naturally  enough,  since  it  regarded  Ilis  person- 
ality as  something  completely  given  from  the  first  by  the 
positing  side  by  side  of  the  Divine  and  human  natures. 
We  lose  a  distinctive  element  in  New  Testament  thought, 
however,  if  we  slur  over  the  universalising  transition 
which  made  resurrection  the  culminating  stage  in  Christ's 
whole  development,  and  conferred  on  Him  a  mode  of 
being  in  harmony  with  His  spiritual  greatness.  Standing 
off  from  the  whole  spectacle  of  His  career,  we  can  discern 
that  One  who  had  it  in  Him  to  become  what  we  now 
worship  could  not  reveal  Himself  fully  as  Lord  while  He 
dwelt  on  earth.  Not  till  He  rose  to  transcendent  dominion 
could  the  secret  be  revealed.  After  the  resurrection,  if 
we  are  to  be  guided  by  apostolic  intuition,  He  was 
somehow  greater  than  before.  He  received  a  new  place 
in  human  faith.  Men  now  honour  the  Son  even  as  they 
honour  the  Father.  And  thus,  in  our  human  way,  we  may 
say  that  the  incarnation  has  not  gone  for  nothing.  It 
is  one  of  the  most  treasured  convictions  of  the  Christian 
mind  that  in  the  Divine  sympathy  for  the  children  of 
men  there  is  now  a  depth  and  intimacy  to  which  that 
earthly  career  contributed,  that  the  Son  who  came  forth 
from  the  Father  has  taken  out  of  time  an  eternal  gain. 
So  the  grace  which  flows  to  us  has  been  enriched  by  all 
things  which  Jesus  underwent.  God  and  man  are  one, 
but  the  unity  results  not  from  the  formal  juxtaposition 
of  abstract  natures,  but  from  spiritually  costly  experiences 
of  reciprocal  possession  and  coalescence.  There  is  now 
a  Person  in  whom  the  focus  of  a  human  life  is  become 
indissolubly  one  with  the  last  reality  of  being,  so  that 
the  heart  of  man  and  the  heart  of  God  beat  in  the  risen 
Lord  with  one  pulsing  movement,  one  indistinguishable 
passion  to  save  and  bless. 

It  is  important  to  observe  that  the  glorifying  of 
Christ  by  resurrection  is  no  mere  spectacular  epilogue  to 
His  earthly  mission.  On  the  contrary,  it  is  part  of  the 
full  glorifying  of  the  Father.  Not  otherwise  could  it 
have  been  clear  that  the  revelation  mediated  by  Christ  is 


372  THE    PERSON    OF   JESUS    CHRIST 

God's  last  word  of  grace,  beyond  which  not  even  infinite 
love  can  go.  The  meaning  of  Clirist  was  the  disclosure  of 
the  Father  as  perfect  love,  but  it  is  frequently  overlooked 
that  this  love  could  not  be  recognised  as  perfect  save 
as  exhibited  in  prevailing  absolute  poiver  as  well  as  ap- 
pealing moral  beauty.  Apart  from  the  manifestation  of 
an  almighty  love  in  the  experience  of  the  Eevealer,  the 
content  of  the  revelation  must  needs  have  been  fras- 
mentary  and  ambiguous.  Eesurrection,  therefore,  crowned 
the  demonstration  of  God's  love  as  the  absolute  power  to 
which  all  reality  is  subservient,  and  which  no  sin  of 
man  or  independent  ordinance  of  nature  can  ever  defeat. 
But  this  display  was  protected  from  the  danger  of  mis- 
construction in  semi-pagan  ways  by  the  fact  of  the  Cross, 
in  which  the  same  Divine  love  suffered  for  the  guilty. 
When  Jesus  passed  into  the  heavens,  it  was  as  bearing 
within  Him  the  fruit  and  issue  of  that  suffering.  His 
glory  always  is  the  glory  of  the  Crucified.  The  pain  of 
the  Eighteous  One  is  become  the  day-star  of  the  world. 

All  that  we  have  said  is  implicit  in  the  language  of 
the  first  Christian  creed — Jesus  is  Lord.^  These  great 
words,  to  be  read  rightly,  should  be  read  twice,  the  stress 
falling  alternately  on  predicate  and  subject.  Jesus  is 
Lord — He  lives  now  in  the  Divine  glory,  omnipresent 
and  almighty  in  His  redeeming  love.  But  also  this  Lord 
is  Jesus — the  Son  of  Man  who  was  made  in  all  things 
like  His  brethren,  and  at  last  bowed  Himself  down  in 
shame  and  agony  and  death.  Self-renouncing  love  on 
the  world's  throne,  Christ  sovereign  through  His  passion — 
this,  in  its  pure  essence,  is  the  apostolic  faith ;  and  is  it 
wonderful  that  those  who  possessed  it,  or  rather  were 
possessed  by  it,  should  have  made  the  New  Testament 
unequalled  in  the  world's  literature  for  glad  hopefulness 
and  serenity  ? 

This  revolutionising  faith  also  implies  that  if  even 
now  the  Church  recognises  the  sovereignty  of  Christ, 
it  will  one  day  be  recognised  by  all.      He    shall  yet  be 

1  1  Co  123,  ph  2". 


THE    GIVER    OF    THE    SPIRIT  373 

manifested  in  modes  not  less  wonderful  than  those  of 
His  first  appearing.  The  instinctive  conviction  that  His 
work  must  reach  consummation  and  perfected  fruition 
has  always  been  a  chief  intluence  stimulating  the  Church 
to  formulate  worthy  conceptions  of  her  Lord.  When  the 
writers  of  the  New  Testament  looked  into  the  stretching 
future,  they  beheld  Jesus  Christ  occupying  a  central 
position  in  the  last  decisive  scene  of  history,  and  the  felt 
greatness  of  His  person,  far  from  crushing  them  in  dumb 
awe,  thrilled  their  imagination,  dilated  their  reason, 
and  lifted  up  their  kindled  minds  to  new,  undreamt-of 
thoughts  concerning  His  relation  to  God  and  man.-  A 
creative  religious  experience  will  always  provide  the  terms 
in  which  it  may  be  fitly  stated. 

The  relation  of  the  exalted  Christ  to  His  followers  is 
described  by  apostolic  writers  in  two  conceptions,  which 
have  been  felt  as  representing  two  cardinal  interests  of 
faith.  These  are  the  conceptions  of  Christ  as  Giver  of 
the  Spirit  and  Intercessor  with  the  Father. 

At  present,  as  I  think,  justice  is  done  to  the  concep- 
tion of  the  Spirit  neither  by  the  severer  forms  of 
traditional  orthodoxy  nor  by  modern  Liberal  Protestantism. 
If  our  faith  on  one  side  is  solicited  for  a  certain  corpus  of 
doctrinal  theory,  on  the  other  we  are  pointed  to  the 
Carpenter  of  Nazareth,  the  heroic  Man  of  the  first  century. 
In  neither  case  is  fellowship  with  a  present  Lord  made 
central.  This  must  deepen  profoundly  our  sense  of  value 
in  the  New  Testament  conception  of  the  Spirit.  For  it  is 
only  as  the  Spirit — one  with  Christ  Himself — comes  to 
perpetuate  the  spiritual  presence  of  the  Lord,  and  to  cast 
light  on  the  unending  significance  of  His  work,  that  we 
are  quite  liberated  from  the  impersonal  and  external, 
whether  it  be  lifeless  doctrine  or  the  historically  verified 
events  of  an  ever-receding  past.  Only  through  the  Spirit 
have  we  contact  with  the  living  Christ.  It  is  particularly 
in  the  pages  of  the  Fourth  Gospel  that  this  large  and 
fruitful  idea  is  presented. 


374  THE   PERSON   OP   JESUS    CHRIST 

The  coming  of  the  Spirit,  however,  is  not  to  be 
conceived  as  forming  a  compensation  or  substitute  for  the 
absent  Christ ;  it  is  the  higher  mode  in  which  Christ 
Himself  is  present.  "  I  will  come  to  you "  and  "  when 
the  Comforter  is  come "  occur  interchangeably,  and  any 
doctrine  of  the  Trinity  which  finds  this  an  insuperable 
obstacle  stands  so  far  convicted  of  tritheism.  Between  the 
Spirit  and  Christ  in  the  heart  no  experimental  distinction 
can  be  made.  The  one  is  the  method  of  the  other.  That 
the  Spirit  should  have  overshadowed  the  historic  Christ 
by  opening  a  new  and  loftier  stage  of  revelation  is  a 
notion  which  the  apostolic  mind  could  not  have  formed. 
As  it  has  been  expressed,  "  the  office  of  the  Spirit  consists 
in  declaring  the  mind  of  Jesus  and  perpetuating  the  work 
He  had  accomplished  in  His  earthly  life.  .  .  .  The  Spirit 
is  the  perennial  source  of  new  revelation,  and  yet  this 
new  revelation  is  only  the  unfolding,  ever  more  largely 
and  clearly,  of  what  has  already  been  imparted  in  the 
life  of  Jesus.  All  our  knowledge  of  God  and  His  truth 
is  ultimately  derived  from  the  historical  manifestation, 
which  conveys  a  different  message  to  each  succeeding 
time,  but  can  never  be  superseded."  ^  The  glorified 
Saviour  is  identical  with  the  Jesus  who  sojourned  on 
earth,  and  the  work  resumed  under  larger  conditions,  with 
an  access  of  Divine  power,  is  but  the  continuation  of  His 
earthly  task,  in  the  light  of  which  it  must  be  interpreted. 
It  may  help  our  apprehension  of  Christ's  exaltation  if  we 
inquire,  very  briefly,  why  the  earthly  life  of  Jesus  should 
have  had  to  close  before  the  Spirit  was  poured  forth. 

(a)  It  is  through  the  Spirit  that  men  become  persuaded 
of  Jesus  as  Eedeemer,  but  prior  to  the  crucifixion  His 
Eedeemership  had  not  been  fully  manifested.  Apart  from 
His  death  in  behalf  of  sinners,  Christ  is  not  completely 
known  as  Saviour,  for  salvation  consists  in  being  recon- 
ciled to  God  in  view  of  Jesus,  while  on  the  other  hand 
before  Calvary  the  holy  love  constitutive  of  His  inmost 
being    was    incompletely    revealed.      To    bear    fruit,    the 

1  Scott,  The  Fourth  Gospel,  351. 


THE   SPIRIT   SUBSEQUENT   TO    CALVARY  375 

corn  must  fall  into  the  ground  and  die.  Thus,  until  in 
the  accomplishment  of  His  vocation  Christ  had  tasted 
death  for  every  man,  the  full  object  which  should  evoke 
the  whole-hearted  faith  He  desired  still  awaited  realisation. 
The  mind  of  the  disciples  was  still  unready  for  the  great 
trift.  "  Even  before  the  ratification  of  the  new  covenant 
in  His  blood,  the  Messianic  gift  of  the  Spirit  was  ready 
to  be  bestowed  upon  all  who  by  faith  would  appropriate 
this  privilege,  yet  not  till  after  our  Lord  had  '  finished ' 
His  work  were  the  conditions  of  receptivity  present  which 
permitted  of  the  full  outpouring."  ^ 

(h)  But  the  resurrection  of  Christ  equally  with  His 
death  is  vital  to  the  Gospel  message ;  hence  only  after 
He  had  risen  could  that  message  be  proclaimed  in  its 
entirety.  Apart  from  the  resurrection  the  revelation  of 
God's  love  in  Christ  is  obviously  faint  and  indecisive. 
Haering  points  out  admirably  that  if  that  love  is  to 
evoke  joyous  and  unreserved  faith,  it  must  reveal  itself  as 
not  merely  patient  of  death  but  triumphant  over  it. 
And  triumphant  in  the  fullest  sense — i.e.,  not  only 
sustaining  Jesus  in  the  last  agony  and  inspiring  Him 
to  the  end  with  trust  unconquerable,  but  charged  with 
sovereign  power  to  deliver  by  abolishing  death  and 
inaugurating  for  Him  a  new  career  of  redemptive  activity. 
Looking  at  Calvary  we  say,  This  love  deserved  to  conquer ; 
looking  to  the  risen  Lord  we  add,  And  in  fact  it  has 
conquered.  It  has  proved  itself  not  merely  the  noblest 
but  the  most  potent  force  of  which  we  have  any  knowledge 
— supreme  in  reality  as  in  idea.  Amor  vincit  omnia — till 
Christ  had  risen  the  ultimate  truth  of  this  saying  might 
be  doubted ;  since  then,  none  in  whom  He  dwells  can 
question  it.  The  Spirit  came,  therefore,  in  connection  with 
a  completely  unveiled  Gospel  which  now  proclaims  a 
Divine  grace  as  almighty  as  it  is  compassionate. 

(c)  The  coming  of  the  Spirit  is  equivalent  to  the 
return  of  Christ  as  an  unseen  and  abiding  presence,  yet 
while  Jesus  lived  on  earth  this  more  intimate  fellowship 

^  Hogg,  Christ's  Message  of  Ihe  Kingdom,  213. 


376  THE    PERSON    OF   JESUS    CHRIST 

could  not  be  realised.  On  earth  He  had  been  manifested 
as  a  human  individual,  hedged  about  by  physical 
necessities,  absent  from  these  followers  that  He  might  be 
with  those.  And  before  "  I  am  glad  for  your  sakes  that 
I  was  not  there "  could  pass  into  "  Lo,  I  am  with  you 
alway,"  a  vast  transformation  in  His  mode  of  existence 
must  occur.  It  was  death  and  resurrection  which  formed 
the  transition-point  and  installed  Him  in  a  new  order  of 
conditions,  through  which  He  became  the  indwelling  life 
of  His  Church.  "  This  universality  of  operation,  both 
intensive  and  extensive,"  writes  Dr.  Forrest,  "  cannot 
belong  to  the  Divine  while  clothed  and  localised  in  '  flesh 
and  blood ' ;  it  must  be  liberated  from  these  bonds  before 
it  can  attain  it.  The  external  factor  must  disappear  ere 
the  Incarnate  can  enter  into  His  glory."  ^  Thus  only 
after  the  resurrection  could  the  Spirit  of  Christ  —  or 
Christ  as  Spirit — be  shed  forth  as  a  widespread,  actual 
experience. 

The  second  mode  in  which  the  risen  Lord  is  presented 
in  the  New  Testament  as  sustaining  active  relations  to 
believers  is  that  of  Intercession.  One  is  occasionally 
tempted  to  ask  whether  this  conception  is  not  one  of 
which  we  moderns  have  lost  the  key.  Nor  need  we  have 
any  scruple  in  conceding  to  the  full  that  the  representa- 
tion of  Christ's  heavenly  intercession  partakes  largely  of 
symbolism.  Yet  symbols  may  have  a  definite  and  even 
an  inexpressibly  precious  significance.  It  was  so  with 
the  Intercession  of  Christ.  "  The  apostles,"  it  has  been 
said,  "  mention  this  sacred  function  with  a  kind  of  adoring 
awe  which  is  quite  peculiar  even  in  the  New  Testament. 
It  seems  to  have  impressed  them  as  one  of  the  unimagin- 
able wonders  of  redemption — something  which  in  love 
went  far  beyond  all  that  we  could  ask  or  think.  When 
inspired  thought  touches  it,  it  rests  on  it  as  an  un- 
surpassable height."  ^ 

Admittedly  the  limits  of    human   faculty  interpose  a 
veto  when  we  attempt  to  explain  specific  acts  in  which 
^  Authority  of  Christ,  350.  *  Denney,  Studies  in  Theology,  162. 


THE    INTERCESSION    OF    CHRIST  377 

our  Lord's  intercession  may  consist.  It  would  be 
meaningless,  for  example,  to  conceive  of  it  as  taking  place 
in  words  or  spoken  entreaty.  Words  imply  distance  and 
duality  of  a  kind  incongruous  with  the  identity  of  life 
subsisting  between  Christ  and  the  Father.  Theirs  is  a 
unity  that  needs  no  language.  On  the  other  hand,  it 
would  be  not  less  erroneous  to  empty  that  intercession 
of  all  personal  significance.  Apparently  we  do  right  to 
image  it  as  involving  at  least  His  mediatorial  presence 
before  God,  with  knowledge  of  each  of  us  and  with  pity 
for  each — His  glorified  person  being,  as  it  were,  a 
ceaselessly  prevailing  appeal  to  the  reconciling  work 
accomplished  on  the  earth,  and  also  a  fact  which  recalls 
intensely  the  perpetual  needs  of  men  still  tried  and 
tempted  as  Christ  had  been.  Thus  our  Lord's  intercession 
implies  at  the  least  that  He  is  concerned  with  real 
participating  sympathy  in  the  experiences  of  His  Church, 
this  sympathy  being  projected  into  His  fellowship  with 
the  Father,  as  a  true  and  living  element  in  its  content. 
In  that  Divine  communion,  those  who  once  were  purchased 
at  so  dear  a  price  are  never  forgotten.  "  With  love  and 
longine  infinite  "  He  who  made  Himself  utterly  one  with 
men  in  life  and  death  is  still  consciously  identified  with 
His  brethren ;  and  the  spirit  and  aims  of  the  great 
Advocate  we  may  gather  from  His  parting  petitions  in  the 
Fourth  Gospel.  "  The  faith  of  the  Church,  and  the 
prayers  which  it  utters — the  responsibilities  which  it 
exercises — in  virtue  of  its  faith,  will  still  have  that 
support  from  the  great  soul  of  Christ  which  during  His 
visible  ministry  had  been  the  stay  of  the  disciples  in  their 
first  steps  in  the  new  life  of  the  Kingdom."  ^ 

These  are  vast  religious  conceptions.  They  are  concep- 
tions which  have  imparted  tone  and  substance  to  Christian 
preaching  at  its  best ;  they  have  also  supplied  strong 
motives  for  consistent  and  impressive  Christian  life.  For 
the  soldier  of  righteousness  it  is  a  very  fount  of  power  to 
reckon  on  the  interest  and  companionship  of  the  Captain 

^  Hogg,  ut  supra,  218. 


378  THE   PERSON   OF   JESUS    CHRIST 

of  salvation ;  to  the  humblest  believer  it  is  everything  to 
rest  in  the  love  of  that  unseen  Friend  whose  faithful  care 
is  unaffected  by  change  of  time  or  dignity.  It  is  part 
therefore  of  the  best  Christian  conviction  that  as  our  Lord 
now  lives  in  God,  and  God  in  Him,  His  thought  and  power 
are  constantly  directed  to  all  believers,  and  that  in  these 
most  real  relations  with  men  He  acts,  as  it  were,  from 
within  the  very  being  of  God  Himself.  His  right  and 
ability  to  act,  moreover,  are  grounded  morally  in  the 
abiding  value  of  His  sacrifice,  in  which  our  interests  were 
completely  and  finally  identified  with  His.  The  succouring 
love  our  prayers  draw  forth  is  not  created  by  our  prayers. 
Eather  its  validity  is  the  steadfast  background  and  potency 
of  all  we  now  receive. 

The  danger  which  has  long  shadowed  faith  in  the 
exalted  Christ  is  that  of  an  unbridled  and  capricious 
mysticism.  Ideas  gained  currency  respecting  His  inter- 
position in  human  lives  which  have  no  relation  to  His  known 
character.  The  glorified  Redeemer  has  been  isolated  from 
the  historic  Jesus,  while  the  individual  soul  has  in  turn 
been  isolated  from  the  vital  organic  brotherhood  of  the 
Church.  Ritschl  poured  a  heavy  fire  upon  the  religious 
illuminati  in  every  age  who,  arrogating  the  right  to  un- 
mediated  fellowship  with  Christ,  have  shown  a  marked 
disposition  to  regard  the  historic  narrative  of  His  life 
as  but  "  milk  for  babes."  ^  It  is  well  known  to  what 
fanatical  excess  such  an  attitude  has  led.  A  shallow  and 
unwholesome  fancy,  often  combined  with  morbid  erotic 
passion,  produced  a  type  of  sentiment  and  belief  totally 
dissimilar  from  the  religion  of  the  New  Testament.  Specula- 
tion, from  an  opposed  yet  kindred  point  of  view,  has 
endeavoured  to  supersede  the  facts  of  history  by  the  idea 
of  a  noumenal  Christ  or  Christ-principle,  which  should 
expand  the  narrow  faith  of  the  Church  into  a  religion  for 
humanity.  The  circumstance  that  the  earthly  Jesus  was 
trammelled  by  restrictions  of  space  and  time,  and  only 
^  Theologie  und  Metaphysik,  25  ff. 


THE    PERILS    OF    MYSTICISM  379 

through  death  passed  into  a  higlier  and  boundless  life,  is 
transformed  into  the  position  that  the  truth  present  in 
Christianity  is  per  se  absolute  and  eternal,  with  a  content 
grounded  in  reason  not  on  fact,  and  wholly  independent 
of  the  fugitive  and  alogical  elements  of  the  time-series. 
For  the  larger  meanings  of  Jesus'  work,  accordingly,  w^e 
must  look  not  to  the  Spirit  unfolding  truth  in  the  Christian 
mind  of  successive  generations,  but  to  "  the  speculative 
fancy,  wandering  at  its  own  pleasure  and  arriving  from 
time  to  time  at  new  beliefs."  Thus  the  exalted  Christ 
vanishes  in  a  mist  of  sentimentalism  or  dialectic.  The 
living  Person  is  discarded,  and  instead  we  are  offered  a 
dream  of  passion  or  a  lifeless  philosophic  principle.  In 
exposing  the  untenability  of  such  conceptions  and  their 
claim  to  rank  as  authentically  Christian,  Eitschl  has  done 
a  peculiarly  important  service.  He  has  effectually  refuted 
the  attempt  to  dissolve  the  person  of  Jesus  in  sub-personal 
factors — mystical  or  speculative — by  pointing  out  that 
validly  Christian  views  of  Christ  are  distinguished  by  two 
marks :  they  predicate  of  the  risen  Lord  those  personal 
features  which  are  present  in  the  historic  Saviour,  and  they 
insist  on  the  fundamental  obligation  to  obey  His  command- 
ments. No  conception  of  His  glory  can  be  true  which 
fails  in  either  of  these  two  ways. 

In  one  respect,  however,  the  interpretation  which 
Eitschl  places  upon  Christ's  present  sovereignty  is  inadequate. 
He  contends  that  if  this  sovereignty  is  to  possess  a 
verifiable  sense  for  our  minds,  we  must  find  all  its 
characteristics  in  Jesus'  earthly  career.^  Now  the  historic 
Jesus  displayed  His  Kingship  by  exerting  a  unique  moral 
power  upon  things  —  by  control  of  circumstance,  by 
ascendancy  over  human  souls,  by  triumph  over  obstacles, 
by  patience  in  suffering,  by  faithfulness  unto  death.  These 
alone,  Eitschl  argues,  are  the  tokens  of  sovereignty ;  and 
the  Christian  message  is  to  the  effect  that  just  by  enduring 
the  world's  hatred,  even  in  its  direst  consequences,  Jesus 
overcame  the  world  and  broke  its  power   for  ever.     We 

*  Justification  and  Reconciliation,  454  ff. 


380  THE    PERSON    OF   JESUS    CHRIST 

shall  all  concede  that  such  a  view  contains  an  immense 
percentage  of  truth.  Too  often  the  majesty  of  Christ  has 
been  depicted  in  purely  secular  and  unethical  forms, 
more  resembling  the  displays  by  which  savage  chieftains 
have  sought  to  overawe  the  explorer  than  the  holy  and 
redeeming  Love  we  are  familiar  with  in  the  New  Testament. 
No  conception,  assuredly,  can  be  right  which  does  not 
start  from  and  revolve  round  the  ethical  forces  through 
which  Jesus  overcame  evil  with  good.  But  is  this  the 
whole  truth  ? 

Not,  it  appears,  if  we  read  the  utterances  of  the 
believing  consciousness  in  a  plain  natural  sense.  When 
faith  calls  Jesus  Lord,  simply  and  without  qualification,  it 
certainly  implies  not  only  that  He  overcame  the  world 
by  invincible  goodness  but  that  all  power  is  His  in  heaven 
and  earth.  He  is  omnipotent  with  the  omnipotence  of 
God ;  to  Him  belongs  absolute  might  to  continue  and 
consummate  the  work  begun  by  His  life,  death,  and  victory. 
Short  of  this  the  Christian  mind  is  not  expressed.  When 
we  analyse  this  conviction,  moreover,  making  explicit  its 
unconscious  logic,  we  discover  its  latent  reasoning  to  run 
in  something  of  this  form :  Not  only  is  Christ  all-good, 
but  there  is  a  mode  of  being  which  answers  to  perfect 
goodness  and  brings  it  completely  to  effectual  manifesta- 
tion. Or,  to  put  it  otherwise,  unity  with  God  means  for 
Jesus  a  real  participation  in  that  transcendent  power  to 
make  the  good  prevail  which  constitutes  deity  in  (so  to 
speak)  its  external  aspect. 

Yet  though  the  interpretation  set  forth  by  Eitschl 
may  be  thus  deficient,  as  a  transcript  of  full  Christian  faith, 
he  insists  on  the  much-needed  lesson  that  our  relation- 
ship to  Christ,  though  immediate,  is  not  unmediated.  In 
this  there  is  no  inconsistency.  I  have  immediate  com- 
munion with  my  friend ;  yet  all  I  know  of  him — all  our 
bygone  talk,  meetings,  mutual  service — are  present  in  that 
communion  to  make  it  what  it  is :  its  present  is  mediated 
through  its  past.  So  too  the  relation  of  the  Christian  to 
Christ  because  personal  is  direct ;  none  the  less,  however, 


THE  DOCTRINE  OF  THE  REAL  PRESENCE    381 

is  it  dependent  on  the  facts  of  history.  Save  on  the  basis 
of  His  recorded  h'fe,  fellowship  with  Him  is  meaningless. 
Nothing  else  will  keep  the  Christian  religion  true  to  type. 
But  this  is  not  the  equivalent  of  saying  that  in  this 
fellowship  we  must  at  every  point  go  round  consciously 
by  the  historic  Jesus.  Certainly  we  do  not  make  this 
ddtour  by  the  past  in  our  intercourse  with  friends.  Eesort 
to  memory  in  this  deliberate  and  habitual  fashion  would 
be  evidence  that  genuine  intimacy  did  not  as  yet  exist. 

Faith  in  the  glorified  Lord  who  is  also  present  ad- 
mittedly forms  a  vital  factor  in  New  Testament  religion. 
It  is,  besides,  the  great  evangelical  reality  which  Eoman 
theology  has  perverted  into  the  Bodily  Presence  of  Christ 
in  the  transubstantiated  elements  of  the  Eucharist.  That 
doctrine  we  cannot  pause  to  examine  now.  It  is  an  attempt 
to  translate  into  material  and  therefore  misleading  terms 
a  fact  which  is  intensely  and  objectively  spiritual.  Never- 
theless it  is  a  positive  doctrine ;  it  answers  to  a  real 
craving ;  and  it  is  certain  that  it  can  never  be  displaced 
by  mere  negations.  In  the  Christian  mind  there  exists  an 
imperious  longing  for  actual  union  with  the  Eedeemer, 
for  immediate  fellowship  with  One  who  forgives  sin  and 
aids  the  struggling  soul  in  its  passionate  pursuit  of  holiness. 
And  the  real  strength  of  the  theory  of  Transubstantiation 
and  the  Bodily  Presence,  it  has  been  said  truly,  "  lies  in 
the  impression  of  multitudes  of  men,  that  if  they  surrender 
their  faith  in  the  awful  mystery  of  the  Eucharist,  Christ 
will  seem  no  longer  near  to  them.  If  He  is  not  present 
in  a  supernatural  way  upon  the  altar,  they  think  that 
they  must  lose  Him  altogether ;  and  they  are  accustomed 
to  speak  about  our  ow^n  service  as  a  mere  '  commemoration 
of  an  absent  Lord.' "  ^  If  we  are  to  meet  the  exigencies 
of  the  soul  in  an  age  when  the  exclusive  claims  of  Eome 
are  felt  as  more  than  ever  alluring  by  minds  which  historic 
criticism  has  perturbed,  it  is  not  enough  to  proclaim  the 
greatness  of  a  long-departed  Hero.  The  world  requires  a 
living  Person,  in  whose  present  grace  sinners  may  find  rest. 
^  Dale,  Essays  and  Addresses,  24. 


382  THE    PERSON    OF   JESUS    CHRIST 

It  need  scarcely  be  added  that  many  aspects  of  tlie 
doctrine  under  review  must  always  remain  in  shadow. 
The  conditions  of  the  world  invisible  lie  beyond  our  ken, 
embracing  numerous  subtle  and  elusive  problems  which 
it  is  vain  to  treat  of.  How  Christ  can  be  a  person,  yet 
ubiquitous ;  where  His  throne  is  situated ;  what  are  the 
nature  and  qualities  of  His  ascended  body — in  regard  to 
such  matters  a  certain  type  of  mind  (like  most  children) 
is  often  curious.  But  why  should  we  pretend  to  know 
where  all  is  unknowable  ?  To  such  inquiries  we  must 
answer  that  the  longing  for  personal  knowledge  of  Christ 
the  Lord  is  satisfied  not  by  apocalyptic  vision  or  the 
pathetic  efforts  of  mistimed  logic,  but  from  the  Gospel  story 
of  His  words  and  deeds.  "  The  secret  things  belong  unto 
the  Lord  our  God ;  but  the  things  that  are  revealed  belong 
unto  us  and  to  our  children  for  ever."  ^  Christ,  as  depicted 
by  apostolic  men,  is  present  with  us  still,  present  to 
save  to  the  uttermost ;  His  person,  thus  qualified  and 
conditioned,  is  the  great  object  held  forth  in  the  Gospel ; 
and  what  is  requisite  for  its  apprehension  is  in  no  sense 
a  vivid  historical  imagination,  still  less  the  trained  faculty 
of  dialectic,  but  a  sincere,  lowly,  and  obedient  trust. 

1  Dt  2929. 


CHAPTER  VL 

THE  PERFECT  MANHOOD  OF  CHRIST. 

In  our  analysis  of  the  believing  consciousness  we  now 
come  upon  the  clear  and  uncontested  fact  that,  when  faith 
looks  at  Jesus  Christ,  whose  present  glory  is  continuous 
with  His  earthly  life,  it  discerns  in  Him  uniquely  perfect 
manhood.  Jesus  is  the  Man  par  excellence.  In  this 
treatise,  however,  we  are  concerned  with  His  manhood  less 
as  apologists  than  as  students  of  His  person.  Or,  to  put  it 
otherwise,  we  wish  not  so  much  to  prove  it  as  to  elicit 
those  features  in  virtue  of  which  it  can  be  described  as 
solitary  and  incomparable,  and,  in  addition,  as  vitally 
significant  for  redemption. 

The  New  Testament  no  more  attempts  to  demonstrate 
the  manhood  of  Jesus  than  the  Old  Testament  to  prove 
the  being  of  God.  To  the  apostles  Jesus  is  human 
throughout  in  temperament,  emotion,  and  attitude.  It 
might  therefore  have  been  supposed  that  whatever  the 
mysteries  of  His  person,  at  all  events  the  truth  of  His 
humanity  was  too  plain  ever  to  be  in  doubt.  But  history 
undeceives  us.  Docetism,  rife  in  many  quarters  even  now, 
was  the  first  Christological  heresy.  Even  in  the  apostolic 
age  its  influence  may  be  detected.  In  the  First  Epistle  of 
John  the  Docetie  seem  to  be  alluded  to  indirectly,  and  the 
writer  in  a  strongly  controversial  passage  takes  occasion  to 

LiTERATUKE— J.  R.  Seeley,  Ecce  Homo,  1865  ;  Sanday,  Outlines  of  the 
Life  of  Christ^,  1906;  von  Soden,  Die  ivicMgsten  Fragen  im  Lehcn  Jem, 
1904  ;  Ullniann,  Sinlessness  of  Jesus,  1858  ;  Bousset,  Jesus,  1906  ;  Mason, 
The  Conditions  of  our  Lord's  Life  on  Earth,  1896  ;  Faiibairn,  Studies  in  the 
Life  of  Christ,  1880;  H.  Weiss,  Vortrcige  iiber  die  Person  Christi,  1863; 
lUingwortli,  Personality,  Human  and  Divine,  1894;  Dn  Bose,  The  Gospel 
in  the  Gospels,  1906  ;  Druiiimond,  Studies  in  Christian  Doctrine,  1908. 

383 


384  THE    PERSON   OF   JESUS    CHRIST 

reassert  the  truth  of  a  veritable  and  indissoluble  incarna- 
tion, as  contrasted  with  the  phantasmal  theory  of  a  Divine 
Christ  walking  the  earth  as  a  protracted  but  none  the  less 
unsubstantial  theophany.^  Thus,  while  one  of  the  first 
disciples  still  lived,  professing  Christians  were  known  to 
whom  it  appeared  incredible  that  Christ  had  been  man, 
and  who  held  explicitly  that  His  body  was  mere  semblance. 
Similarly  it  was  a  tenet  of  second-century  Gnosticism  that 
our  Lord  had  no  real  share  in  the  material  side  of  human 
life.  It  was  said  that  He  took  on  a  different  guise  to 
different  onlookers,  and  at  different  times.  And  in  later 
ages  it  is  common  to  find  Jesus'  identity  with  us  in 
manhood  either  denied  or  in  various  ways  curtailed,  under 
the  erroneous  impression  that  a  deeper  reverence  is  thereby 
paid  to  His  higher  being.  Thus  a  persistent  tendency  is 
observable,  even  in  common  speech,  to  describe  His 
manhood  in  non-personal  terms :  it  is  a  body,  a  temple, 
metal  fused  with  fire,  a  bush  in  which  dwells  the  flame  of 
deity  without  consuming  it. 

It  is  not,  of  course,  for  us  to  censure  these  errors 
harshly,  at  least  in  their  more  primitive  manifestations. 
In  antiquity  the  belief  prevailed  widely  that  the  body  is 
itself  evil,  radically  and  incurably ;  not  the  seat  or  nidus 
of  sin  merely,  but  its  producing  cause.  Men  who  carried 
this  notion  into  the  Church  may  well  have  found  it  hard 
to  concur  in  the  assertion  that  Jesus'  body  was  essentially 
identical  with  ours.  Again,  if  some  questioned  the  reality 
of  His  body,  surmising  that  men  saw  and  touched  Him  as 
one  may  a  figure  in  a  dream,^  others,  for  whom  His  body 
was  quite  real,  were  unable  to  believe  that  God  incarnate 
possessed  a  completely  human  soul.  In  such  a  case  it  is 
doubtless  open  to  us  to  say  that  they  were  dimly  feeling 
after  the  idea  of  Christ  mystical — of  a  personal  redeeming 

1  5«-8  ;  cf.  221-23  41-3  415^  It  ig  a  remark  of  Professor  Burkitt's  that 
"the  Gospels  we  have  -would  never  have  become  the  official  charters  of  the 
Church  but  for  the  theological  necessity  of  insisting  upon  the  true  human 
nature  of  our  Lord  "  {Gospel  History  and  its  Transtnixsion,  263). 

2  This  may  have  sprung  from  the  narrative  of  Jesus'  walking  on  the  sea. 


HIS    INDIVIDUAL    MANHOOD  385 

Life,  that  is,  which  is  uncon fined  within  the  bounds  of 
separate  or  particular  individuality  but  rather  pervades 
unnumbered  souls  with  its  own  vitality  and  power. 
However  that  may  be,  the  Church  has  uniformly  rejected 
an  outspoken  Docetism ;  this  we  may  say  unreservedly  in 
spite  of  the  fact  that  arguments  of  an  unconsciously 
docetic  order  have  frequently  been  employed  in  the  long 
debate,  ancient  or  modern,  as  to  the  limitations  of  our 
Lord's  knowledge,  or  the  possibility  in  His  case  of  painful, 
acute  temptation.  Christians  have  always  felt  that  to 
regard  the  Jesus  of  the  Gospels  as  no  more  than  an 
abstract  phantom  is  to  take  all  meaning  out  of  salvation. 
To  the  pure  Docetist,  the  Saviour  has  no  history. 

We  cannot  indeed  overestimate  the  importance  of  the 
fact  that  Jesus'  redeeming  influence  on  the  world — all 
that  has  induced  men  to  call  Him  Lord  and  Saviour — 
owes  to  His  humanity  at  once  its  individual  and  its  social 
power,  and  is  complete  only  with  the  completeness  of  His 
manhood.  It  is  as  man  that  He  takes  His  place  in  the 
historic  context.  Of  course  the  influence  of  Jesus  is  more 
than  historical;  it  is  also  what  may  be  called  super- 
historical,  or,  in  one  aspect,  timeless  and  eternal.  But  yet 
this  very  quality  of  timelessuess,  whereby  He  becomes  the 
contemporary  of  all  ages,  and  touches  sinful  hearts  in  every 
land,  conveying  to  faith  the  life  of  God,  is  something  which 
only  secured  its  foothold  in  the  world  through  its  actual- 
isation  as  a  real  element  in  the  time-series,  a  perfect 
earthly  medium  of  grace.  Had  Jesus'  manhood  been  ficti- 
tious or  abridged,  no  fully  saving  power  could  pass  forth 
from  Him  to  win  mankind,  and  God  were  still  far  away. 

As  our  initial  datum  we  may  select  the  truth  that 
Jesus,  as  man,  was  possessed  of  personal  individuality. 
He  was  not  only  Man,  He  was  a  man.  This  might  seem 
to  be  obviously  implied  in  the  facts  of  the  Gospel  narra- 
tive. It  is  not  too  much  to  say  that  no  reader  of  the  four 
evangelists  could  conceivably  arrive  at  any  other  im- 
pression than  that  the  central  Figure  was  veritably  a  man — 
25 


386  THE    PERSON    OF   JESUS    CHRIST 

not  merely  a  man,  indeed,  but  a  Jew  of  the  first  century 
— unless  a  contrary  view  had  been  put  into  his  mind  from 
outside.  Nevertheless,  as  we  know,  traditional  orthodoxy 
came  to  a  different  finding.  Slowly  and  by  faint  degrees, 
it  is  true ;  as  late  as  Origen  and  Tertullian  ^  it  was  openly 
taught  by  Church  teachers  that  Jesus  was  a  man ;  even 
the  homo  in  Leo's  Epistle  to  Flavian,  if  taken  seriously, 
witnesses  clearly  enough  to  an  individual  humanity.  But 
at  least  by  the  time  of  Cyril  of  Alexandria  the  sense  of 
this  individuality  had  become  more  dim  in  the  Eastern 
Church ;  and  we  are  not  wrong,  perhaps,  in  regarding  a 
marked  drift  in  the  contrary  direction  as  one  of  Apollin- 
aris'  least  desirable  legacies.  The  adjective  evv7r6a7aro<i 
was  expressly  coined  by  Leontius  of  Byzantium  to  convey 
the  idea  of  a  human  nature  which,  not  being  personal 
independently  or  in  itself,  yet  found  its  personality  in  the 
Divine  Logos.  But  as  time  passed  the  more  cautious 
distinctions  of  Leontius  were  in  part  forgotten,  in  part 
rejected ;  and  later  thought  in  both  East  and  West 
betrayed  a  much  closer  affinity  with  the  more  uncom- 
promising anhypostasia  than  with  the  enhypostasia  which 
had  been  put  forward  by  Leontius.^  The  point  of  view 
we  may  gather  from  Alcuin's  well-known  phrase :  accessit 
humanitas  in  unitatem  personae  filii  del.  Hence  the 
unfortunate  usage,  still  common  in  text-books,  which 
definitely  predicates  of  Christ  "  an  impersonal  humanity," 
a  phrase  on  which,  after  using  it,  Dean  Strong  makes  the 
justly  severe  comment  that  "  it  suggests  a  kind  of  abstract 
idea  of  man  lying  untenanted,  and  adopted  by  a  Divine 
Person,  and  it  is  obvious  that  it  opens  the  door  to 
scholasticism  of  an  unduly  technical  sort."  ^  We  are 
rightly  told  that  the  truth  against  which  the  phrase  is 
designed  to  safeguard  is  this,  that    the  humanity  of  our 

'  Cf.  Athanasius,  de  Inc.  c.  43. 

^  But  in  Catholic  theology  the  impersonality  of  Christ's  manhood  is 
often  ignored  where  the  argument  will  not  bear  it  :  e.g.  in  the  discussion  of 
His  atoning  obedience.  There  is  a  real  sense,  in  other  words,  in  which 
Christ  had  to  act  for  Himself  before  He  could  act  for  others. 

*  Manual  of  Theology  (2nd  edit.),  130. 


HIS    INDIVIDUAL    MANHOOD  387 

Lord  had  no  independent  personality  ;  in  other  words,  it 
was  intentionally  framed  as  a  bulwark  against  the  re- 
current menace  of  Nestorianism.  And  so  far,  doubtless, 
it  has  a  certain  historic  title  to  be  received.  It  is  another 
question  whether  the  position  it  marks  is  one  in  which  the 
Christian  mind  can  rest. 

Be  this  as  it  may,  this  conception  of  a  humanity  which 
is  not  that  of  an  individual  man  is  notoriously  still  held 
by  able  writers.  Thus,  to  take  a  recent  example,  Dr.  Du 
Bose  argues  strongly  in  favour  of  the  Virgin  Birth  that 
"  the  product  of  every  natural  union  is  an  individual 
person,"  and  that  "  in  the  light  of  all  that  Jesus  Christ 
is  to  the  Church  and  to  humanity.  His  universality, 
sufficiency,  and  ubiquity,"  it  is  impossible  to  believe  that 
He  is  only  a  human  individual.^  In  a  later  work  he 
grapples  with  the  question  still  more  directly,  introducing 
an  objector  who  states  the  counter-position  not  only  with 
great  impartiality,  but,  as  I  conceive,  with  unanswerable 
force.  "  One  says :  You  lay  great  stress  upon  the  view 
that  our  Lord  was  net  a  man,  but  man.  I  find  this  a 
difficult  conception  ;  does  it  mean  that  humanity  has  a 
concrete  real  existence  apart  from  the  individual  persons 
who  are  human,  and  that  this  Universal  becomes  visible 
in  Christ  ?  If  this  be  so,  does  it  not  lead  us  to  a  meta- 
physical realism,  not  now  generally  held  ? "  To  this  Dr. 
Du  Bose's  answer,  based  on  the  right  assumption  that 
faith  needs  a  Christ  who  is  universal,  is  that  "  the 
universality  of  our  Lord's  humanity  is  only  explicable 
upon  the  fact  that  His  personality  is  a  Divine  one.  .  .  . 
The  concrete  universal  of  humanity  which  may  be  found 
in  Jesus  Christ  belongs  to  it  not  as  humanity  but  as  God 
in  humanity.  It  is  God  in  it  which  makes  that  particular 
humanity  of  our  Lord,  His  holiness,  His  righteousness,  His 
life,  valid  and  available  for  all ;  so  that  every  man  may 
find  himself  in  Christ  and  in  Christ  find  himself."  ^     The 

'  Gospel  in  the  Gospels,  212. 

2  Gospel  according  to  St.  Paul,  297  (quoted  by  Sanday,  Life  of  Christ  in 
Becent  Research,  310). 


388  THE    PERSON   OF   JESUS    CHRIST 

same  position  is  apparently  taken  by  Dr.  Moberly,  who 
writes :  "  If  Christ  might  have  been,  yet  He  certainly  was 
not,  a  man  only,  amongst  men.  His  relation  to  the 
human  race  is  not  that  He  was  another  specimen,  differing, 
by  being  another,  from  every  one  except  Himself.  His 
relation  to  the  race  was  not  a  differentiating  but  a  con- 
summating relation.  He  was  not  generically,  but  in- 
clusively, man."  And  his  statement  closes  on  the  same 
note  as  Dr.  Du  Bose  by  affirming  that  the  relation  of 
Jesus  Christ  to  mankind  is  "  a  Spiritual  property,  so 
sovereign,  so  transcendent,  that  it  could  only  be  a  property 
of  a  Humanity  which  was  not  merely  the  Humanity  of  a 
finite  creature,  but  the  Humanity  of  the  infinite  God."^ 
These  instances  sufficiently  prove  the  deep  conviction  with 
which  the  idea  has  been  set  forth  quite  recently.  The 
gist  of  the  conception  may  perhaps  be  put  briefly  somewhat 
as  follows :  Because  Christ  as  man  is  of  universal  and 
organic  significance  for  mankind,  it  is  not  possible  that  He 
should  be  individual. 

If,  however,  we  take  the  problem  into  the  light  of 
the  Gospel  story,  it  is  difficult  to  avoid  stating  what  seems 
truth  in  terms  precisely  the  reverse  of  this :  Because 
Christ  is  universal  and  central,  He  is  also  an  individual. 
It  is  His  differentia,  in  short,  to  be  the  central  individual. 
Let  it  be  noted,  however,  that  to  regard  Christ  as  an 
individual  is  in  no  sense  equivalent  to  the  position  that 
He  is  "  only  one  of  the  sons  of  men  peculiarly  favoured 
and  most  highly  endowed."  Too  often  the  argument  is 
vitiated  by  this  assumption.  The  writers  I  have  named 
constantly  suppose  that  we  must  choose  between  saying 
that  Christ  was  not  a  man,  but  humanity  inclusive,  and 
dismissing  Him  as  but  one  more  good  man,  a  simple 
member  of  the  race,  to  whom  we  are  related  exactly  as 
one  unit  is  to  his  neighbour.  The  alternative  is  quite 
unreal.  To  call  Christ  an  individual  is  but  another  way 
of  putting  the  fact  that  He  can  be  distinguished  clearly 
as  man  from  (say)   Peter  or  Thomas.     And    the    special 

^  Atonement  and  Personality,  86,  89. 


HIS    INDIVIDUAL    MANHOOD  389 

philosophy  of  His  uuiqueness  which  denies  that  He  was 
a  man  is  surely  at  war  with  this  fact. 

The    truth  is  that   the    scholastic   conception  of    the 
universal  humanitus  as  itself  real  and  concrete  no  longer 
satisfies  the  mind.     In  the  domain  of  reality  there  is  no 
such  thing  existing  independently  as  humanitas,  or  "  man 
in  general."     To  say  so  leaves  the  validity  of  knowledge 
untouched,    since    no     one    can     think    of    or    mentally 
represent  a  "man  in  general."     No  one  can  represent  a 
man  who  also  is  the  nature  common  to  all  members  of  the 
class  "  man."     Of  course  it  is  true  that  particular  existences 
do  in  fact  share  a  common  character.     Nor  is  this  common 
character  a  figment  of  the  mind  ;  rather  it  explains  why 
different  individuals,  even  though  different,  have  the  same 
name.      It    indicates    the     common     possession     by    such 
individuals  of  certain  attributes  or  qualities.     This,  however, 
wliile  no  less  truly  an  aspect  or  function  of  reality  than 
the  concrete  instances  in  which  it  is  exemplified,  is  per  se 
a  pure  abstraction,  which  has  not  and  cannot  have  existence 
independently    or    by   itself.     The    real   human   universe, 
then,  is  made  up  of    individual  men    possessing  common 
properties  or  a   common   character.      In    any  other  light 
humanitas  is  a  purely  enigmatical  entity.     Applied  to  our 
question,  this  means  that  while  mankind  is  in  a  true  sense 
one,  and   is   qualified   by   solidarity,   while   also   God  has 
mediated   redemption    through    this    oneness,  we   are   not 
therefore  justified  in  saying   that  Christ  is  this  oneness, 
this  solidarity  incarnate.      Eather  it  is  in  virtue  of  such 
oneness,  such  bonds  of  mutual  involution  between  life  and 
life,  that  we  believe  Jesus  Christ,  a  real  individual,  to  be 
able   to   exert    universal    saving   power.     The   individual, 
in  short,  is  not  the  contrary  of  the  universal ;  in  varied 
degree    he    is    the    universal    in    concrete    form.     Hence, 
without    ceasing    to    be    individual,    Christ    may    be    the 
universal,  focal  member  of  our  organic  race.     No  incon- 
gruity   obtains    as    between    these    two    things.     On   the 
contrary,  it  is    matter    of    common    knowledge    that   the 
greater  a  man  is — the  more  numerous  the  points  at  which 


390  THE   PERSON   OP   JESUS   CHRIST 

he  has  contact  with,  and  affects,  the  human  environment — 
the  more  self-possessed  and  concrete  his  individuality. 
We  can  only  think  of  the  Lord  Jesus  Christ  as  the  ideal 
limit  of  this  conjunction,  linked  to  all  men  in  His  Divine 
outflowing  love,  yet  always  master  of  His  self-conditioned 
life.  As  Bishop  D'Arcy  has  expressed  it :  "  The  personality 
of  our  Lord  is  the  most  distinct  and  concrete  of  which 
we  have  any  knowledge.  ...  To  confuse  the  boundaries 
which  give  the  Ego  its  distinctness,  for  the  sake  of 
making  an  abstract  doctrine  appear  more  intelligible,  is 
surely  a  dangerous  error.  Our  Lord  was  very  man, 
and  His  Ego  had  all  the  self-possession  and  self- 
consciousness  which  give  to  every  human  soul  its  personal 
distinctness."  ^ 

I  should  therefore  incline  to  say  that  what  mainly 
invites  criticism  in  Dr.  Du  Bose's  able  statement  is  his 
view  of  the  individual.  That  cannot  be  defined  simply 
as  the  opposite  of  the  universal.^  We  may  accept  without 
reserve  his  remark  that  "  it  is  God  in  it  which  makes  that 
particular  humanity  of  our  Lord,  His  holiness,  His  righteous- 
ness. His  life,  valid  and  available  for  all,"  merely  pointing 
out  that  by  thus  using  the  words  "  that  particular  humanity 
of  our  Lord  "  he  grants  all  we  ask.  After  all,  it  appears 
Christ's  humanity  is  particular  or — the  better  word — in- 
dividual ;  yet  it  is  also  universal.  On  the  facts,  then,  there 
is  no  dispute ;  what  leads  to  divergence  of  opinion  is  an 
old  but  outworn  philosophic  conception  of  the  universal. 
If  we  are  not  to  trust  our  intuitive  perception  that  the 
Christ  we  read  of  in  the  Gospels  is  an  individual  man,  it 
is  hard  to  say  what  perception  could  be  trusted.^  As  we 
follow  His  life,  we  become  infinitely  more  sure  of  His 
human  individuality  than  we  can  ever  be  of  the  fallible 
human  logic  which  denies  it. 

^  Hastings'  DCG.  ii.  art.  "Trinity." 

^Cf.  A.  D.  Lindsay,  Philosophy  of  Bergson,  189. 

»  Dr.  Mason  points  out  that  more  than  once  in  the  New  Testament  Christ 
is  called  not  dudpoiTro?  merely,  but  dvrip,  and  that  dv-qp  carries  the  sense  of 
distinct  individuality  {Conditions  of  our  Lord's  Life  on  Earth,  46-47). 


HIS    MANHOOD    UNIVERSAL  391 

Turning  now  to  a  new  aspect,  let  us  inquire  whether 
we  can  impart  a  more  than  logical  sense  to  the  universality 
just  affirmed.  Can  we  fill  it  out  with  an  ethical  and 
spiritual  significance  which  reveals  it  as  human,  concrete, 
intelligible  ?  In  part  we  may,  I  think.  We  rightly 
signalise,  for  example,  the  wondrous  combination  in  Christ 
of  qualities  which  tend  in  other  men  to  be  only  opposed 
angularities,  but  which  by  their  perfect  harmony  in  Jesus 
fit  Him  to  be  Saviour  alike  of  the  single  life  and  of  society. 
Thus  He  was  stern  with  an  awful  gra\dty  that  shook  the 
heart,  made  undreamt  -  of  claims,  and  shrank  from  no 
menace  of  judgment  or  unrelenting  exposure  of  evil ;  yet 
He  has  given  to  men  a  new  conception  of  love,  and  lives 
on  in  their  souls  by  the  memory  of  a  tireless  pity  that 
received  sinners,  wept  over  their  blindness,  and  at  last  bore 
death  itself  in  a  passion  to  redeem.  Between  the  two — 
the  indignation  and  the  tenderness — there  is  no  random 
vacillation,  no  capricious  change ;  each  rather  is  the 
support,  content,  and  basis  of  the  other.  He  lives  above 
the  power  of  earthly  things,  yet  with  no  disdain.  Never 
was  ascetic  less  the  captive  of  mere  pleasure,  yet  life  is 
holy  for  Him  in  all  its  elements ;  if  He  has  not  where  to 
lay  His  head.  He  can  still  be  partaker  in  the  innocent  joy 
of  a  wedding-feast.  He  ate  and  drank  as  a  man  with 
men.  He  bade  them  pray  for  daily  bread,  He  set  forth 
the  uncareful  happiness  of  children  as  model ;  yet  when 
He  calls  they  must  leave  home  and  goods  and  honour  all 
behind,  as  having  no  value  in  competition  with  the 
Kingdom  and  its  righteousness.  There  joined  in  Him 
the  loftiest  consciousness  of  self  and  the  lowliest  humility. 
He  was  more  than  Solomon  or  the  Temple — He  was  the 
Lord  of  His  disciples,  and  the  very  Son  of  God  ;  yet  He 
is  baptized  at  the  hands  of  John,  He  comes  not  to  be 
ministered  unto  but  to  minister,  He  puts  aside  the  glory 
men  can  give.  In  His  piety  the  two  strands  of  fervid 
ecstasy  and  quiet  faith  are  so  intertwined  that  it  is 
hard  if  not  impossible  to  tell  which  predominates.  In 
His  relations  to  others  we  see  Him  now  as  disposed  to 


392  THE    PERSON    OF   JESUS    CHRIST 

private  friendships,  now  as  caring  for  the  multitude,  now 
as  the  Solitary  ;  yet  always  and  in  every  case  Himself. 
Thus,  as  von  Soden  has  expressed  it,  "  in  the  nature  of 
Jesus  there  was  no  lack  of  contrasts.  But  they  are 
always  resolved  in  the  wonderful  completeness  and 
harmony  of  His  being.  The  opposites  are  always  in 
equilibrium.  Therefore  His  personality,  many-sided  as  it 
is,  is  not  complicated.  In  the  last  resort  they  are  not 
indeed  so  many  independent  qualities ;  but,  strictly 
speaking,  under  the  action  of  His  human  nature  and 
its  surroundings,  they  are  just  so  many  prismatic  rays 
in  the  diamond  of  His  soul."  ^  Now  this  incomparable 
diversity  of  interests  or  qualities,  all  fused  obediently  in 
a  character  single  and  distinct,  like  a  flavour  or  a  frag- 
rance, is  part  of  what  we  mean  by  the  universality  of 
Jesus'  manhood.  The  true  attributes  of  humanity  meet 
in  Him,  yet  they  meet  in  an  individual  life  which  thus 
reaches  out  to  every  member  of  the  race,  and  forms  its 
proper  centre  and  rallying-point.  In  virtue  of  this  ethical 
universality,  Jesus  is  more  real,  sure,  and  near  to  men  of 
every  time  than  friend  to  friend.  Christian  missions  are 
the  proof.  Tliough  set  within  a  specific  race  and  age, 
He  is  none  the  less  in  the  plenitude  of  His  manhood  the 
Man  of  every  age,  the  Elder  Brother  of  us  all. 

This  becomes  still  clearer  when  we  survey  the  life- 
work  He  accomplished.  Here  also  is  seen  a  perfect 
harmony  of  the  individual  and  the  universal.  For  on 
the  one  hand,  the  vocation  given  Him  by  the  Father  is 
sharply  limited  and  defined.  The  religious  life  is  in- 
cumbent on  all  men ;  but  what  we  cannot  fail  to  note  is 
that  for  Jesus  it  became  a  strictly  exclusive  and  all- 
absorbing  task.  This  has  occasionally  been  slurred  over 
in  vague  eulogies  to  the  effect  that  He  was  complete, 
ideal  man,  and  under  cover  of  this  general  description  He 
is  represented  as  in  possession  of  all  the  human  talents. 
"  As  a  philosopher,"  says  one  writer,  "  He  would  have  sur- 
passed Socrates,  as  an  orator  have  eclipsed  Demosthenes." 

^  Die  wichiigslen  Fragen  im  Lehen  Jesu,  88  (quoted  by  Sanday). 


HIS    MANHOOD    UNIVERSAL  393 

If  this  meaus  that  iu  philosophy  Jesus'  gifts  were  superior 
to  those  of  Socrates,  in  oratory  to  those  of  Demosthenes — 
for  consistency  we  are  bound  to  add,  in  mathematics  to 
Newton,  in  painting  to  Velasquez — the  statement,  so  far 
as  evidence  is  concerned,  must  be  repelled  as  baseless.  In 
the  fields  of  science  or  art  Jesus  was  not  supreme,  for 
there  God  has  chosen  to  cast  mankind  upon  their  own 
exertions ;  and  it  is  surely  clear  that,  by  engaging  in  any 
of  these  specialised  lines  of  service.  He  would  have  for- 
feited just  so  much  universality.  For  religion,  concerned 
as  it  is  with  man's  relation  to  God,  is  the  most  manifold 
and  comprehensive  of  all  interests,  in  contrast  to  which 
others  are  provincial ;  it  was  not  possible  therefore  that 
Jesus  should  confine  Himself  within  more  special  bounds 
except  at  the  cost  of  becoming  one  of  a  class,  and  thus 
failing  in  ceutrality.  His  life-work  was  unique,  not  in 
the  sense  of  being  narrowly  engrossed  in  a  single  sphere, 
like  that  of  the  merchant,  the  politician,  or  the  divine ; 
but  in  the  sense  that  it  bore  on  that  which  is  deepest  in 
all  men.  Non  multa  seel  multum  was  the  signature  of  His 
career ;  to  put  more  into  His  life-programme  would  in  fact 
have  been  to  put  infinitely  less.  As  He  laboured  solely 
within  the  house  of  Israel,  in  order  thereby  to  lay  the 
corner-stone  of  the  Church  universal  and  catholic,  so, 
with  equal  reason,  He  confined  His  life-work  to  the  task 
of  Mediatorship  that  He  might  fulfil  God's  purpose  for 
all  mankind.^ 

Yet  in  this  life,  limited  to  the  central  and  the 
absolute.  His  own  consciousness  found  no  omission,  no 
unfinished  page.  Of  the  dim  regrets  which  torture  even 
the  best  men,  as  they  question  half-sadly  at  the  end 
whether  all  has  been  done  that  might  be  done,  there  is  no 
trace.     Jesus'  life  is  a  unity,  woven  without  seam  from 

'  The  late  T.  H.  Green  has  expresse<i  this  finely  :  "  It  is  because  Jesus, 
under  limiting  conditions,  lived  a  life  which  is  limited  to  no  conditions,  and 
under  special  circuni stances  proclaimed  a  priucijile  which  is  applicable  to  all 
circumstances,  that  His  life  and  His  principle  are  rightly  called  absolute  " 
( Works,  iii.  p.  xxxix). 


394  THE    PERSON    OF   JESUS    CHRIST 

the  top  to  the  bottom.  Even  in  Gethsemane,  His 
momentary  doubt  is  liot  whether  He  must  obey  the 
Father ;  rather  it  is  an  impHcit  question  as  to  the 
Father's  will,  an  inquiry  whether  the  cup  now  at  His  lips 
has  been  placed  there  with  the  full  intent  that  He  shall 
drink  it.  Thus  at  the  last  it  is  on  a  noticeably  specific 
note  that  His  mind  rests :  "  I  have  finished  the  work 
that  Thou  gavest  me  to  do."  No  vague  or  general 
vocation  had  been  appointed  Him,  nor  yet  one  so  circum- 
scribed as  to  fence  Him  off  from  all  but  a  certain  defined 
class ;  but  the  distinct,  fundamentally  universal  task  of 
establishing  the  Kingdom  and  reconciling  man  to  God. 

As  we  have  seen,  it  is  supremely  in  the  resurrection 
that  the  universality  of  Jesus  is  illustrated  and  revealed. 
As  the  climax  of  a  human  life,  resurrection  is  wholly 
exceptional ;  and  He  of  whom  it  is  predicable  is  thereby 
determined  as  both  unprecedented  and  inimitable.  True, 
His  victory  over  death  is  prophetic  of  ours  in  Him ;  yet 
all  His  uniqueness  is  still  guaranteed  by  His  mediation 
to  us  of  the  last  triumph.  Through  His  rising  from  the 
dead,  the  universality  of  life,  of  appeal,  of  redeeming 
power  which  had  from  the  first  belonged  to  Him  de  jure, 
took  on  de  facto  the  mode  of  being  which  answers  to  its  real 
character.  It  rose  above  the  bounds  of  space  and  time. 
If  till  that  crisis  it  had  been  exerted  only  in  special 
instances,  though  world-wide  in  essential  import,  it  at 
last  became  available  and  effective  for  the  whole  world. 
If  till  then  He  had  been  hedged  in  by  physical  restraints 
— distant  from  Bethany  when  Lazarus  His  friend  fell 
asleep,  so  that  it  could  be  said,  "  Lord,  if  Thou  hadst 
been  here " — henceforward  He  was  known  and  felt, 
everywhere  and  always,  as  an  unseen  Presence.  Thus  the 
Jesus  of  history  passed  into  the  Christ  of  experience,  not 
in  virtue  of  any  mere  change  in  the  imagination  of  His  fol- 
lowers, but  by  the  objective  universalisation  of  His  power. 

This  individual  yet  universal  life,  again,  is  marked 
ill  the  fullest  sense  by  reality  and  integrity.      It    is    no 


A    COMPLETE    HUMANITY  395 

mutilated  manliood  we  see  in  CJlirist.  A  proof  that  tliis 
has  been  intuitively  recognised  is  the  fact  that  countless 
believers  have  confessed  to  a  deep  sense  of  Christ's 
perfect  sympathy  with  their  need  and  pain  and  joy. 
Not  only  so ;  they  have  been  conscious  of  a  deep  sympathy 
with  Him.  As  we  contemplate  His  life,  its  action  and 
passion,  the  aspirations  which  move  it  and  the  sinless 
infirmity  by  which  it  is  encompassed ;  as  we  listen  to  His 
voice,  or  look  upon  His  deeds  of  power  and  mercy,  nothing 
in  it  all  is  alien  to  our  mind.  It  takes  form  and  shape 
in  a  medium  with  which  we  are  familiar.  And  we  can 
say,  not  of  their  quality,  which  is  untainted,  but  of  their 
nature,  "  These  are  our  acts,  our  thoughts,  our  feelings ; 
they  are  the  very  emotions  and  impulses  of  soul  by  which 
we  too  are  agitated.  He  speaks  our  tongue,  He  endures 
our  pain,  our  anguish  and  distress  He  bears  with  us,  and 
as  we  bear  it.  Bone  of  our  bone  and  flesh  of  our  flesh, 
nothing  in  human  nature  escapes  Him  who  names  Himself 
Son  of  Man,  nothing  in  life  and  nothing  in  death :  He  is 
our  Brother  even  to  the  end."  ^ 

We  may  illustrate  the  integrity  of  Christ's  manhood, 
then  ;  what  we  cannot  do  is  to  prove  it  by  logic.  It  is 
impossible  to  strengthen  by  demonstration  what  is  self- 
evident  from  the  first.  To  all  who  read  the  Gospels  with 
an  open  mind  it  is  plain  that  Jesus  was  completely  man. 
Were  it  conceivable  indeed  that  we  were  forced  to  choose 
— as  we  are  not — between  the  conviction  that  Jesus 
possessed  true  manhood  in  all  its  parts,  and  the  assurance 
that  He  was  the  Son  of  God  come  in  flesh  for  our  salvation, 
our  plain  duty  would  be  to  affirm  His  humanity  and  re- 
nounce His  deity.  Doubtless  in  point  of  fact  both  things 
are  sure  to  faith ;  but  none  the  less  it  is  from  the  primary 
and  fundamental  certitude  of  His  unity  with  us  in  man- 
hood that  we  rise  up  to  the  truth  of  His  higher  nature. 
He  is  at  all  events  complete  man,  whatever  more. 

Let  us  briefly  exemplify  this  by  the  various  aspects 
or  elements  of  human  life  —  corporeal,  moral,  social, 
'  Gaston  Frommel,  tludcs  morales  et  religicuses,  59  f. 


396  THE    PERSON    OF    JESUS    CHRIST 

emotional,  intellectual,  religious.  Everywhere  the  integrity 
of  Jesus'  life  as  man  is  clear.  His  body  was  flesh  and 
blood  like  ours.  Its  capacity  of  pain,  of  privation,  of 
fatigue  ;  its  tears  and  agony  and  cries ;  its  shrinking  from 
the  hour  of  death ;  its  sensitiveness  to  the  contact  of  other 
men ;  its  susceptibility  to  the  influence  of  nature,  felt  in 
the  thrill  of  gladness  begotten  by  the  sunlight  and  the 
flowers — all  this  is  authentically  human.  Always  the 
body  of  Jesus,  through  its  vital  and  mobile  relations  to  the 
world,  served  and  nourished  the  growth  of  His  self-con- 
sciousness. His  moral  experience  too  was  human.  Duty 
was  to  Him  a  vast,  solemn  fact,  presenting  itself  uniformly 
as  the  Father's  will ;  as  we  read  on  we  can  discern  that 
even  for  this  "  Son  "  there  was  assigned  a  piece-by -piece 
discovery  of  the  right  way,  a  gradual  acceptance  of  un- 
foreseen responsibilities  disclosed  by  the  progress  of  life. 
He  must  choose  out  His  own  path,  develop  His  purpose, 
do  justice  to  His  own  nature.  His  career  was  no  irre- 
sponsible adventure.  Each  step  had  moral  value,  and 
called  for  insight,  courage,  fidelity,  patience.  Once  more, 
His  emotional  life  reveals  the  shifting  play  of  joy  and 
pain  and  wonder.  The  story  of  His  soul  is  no  surface 
uniformly  blank  and  regular,  but  a  varied  landscape,  a 
country  with  an  atmosphere.  The  light  and  shade  of 
feeling  move  across  it — love,  anger,  grief,  compassion ; 
to  all  He  is  humanly  sensitive,  not  staying  coldly  on 
the  outmost  rim  of  the  capacity  of  emotion  but  entering 
it  with  a  natural  immediacy ;  yet  never  seeking  joy  or 
sorrow  for  its  own  sake  only  or  permitting  it  to  overmaster 
the  focus  of  consciousness.  How  He  is  altogether  one 
with  His  brethren  in  that  piercing  question,  "  Could  ye 
not  watch  with  Me  one  hour  ? "  or  in  the  tears  at  Lazarus' 
grave  preceded  by  that  strange  brief  gust  of  "  indignation," 
in  which,  as  it  would  seem,  His  spirit  revolted  against 
the  miseries  of  the  world  and  the  broken  hearts  of  those 
that  loved  Him.^  That  dying  care  for  His  mother  ;  that 
peculiar  affection  for  one   disciple;  that  look  cast  on   the 


HIS   INTELLECTUAL    EXPERIENCE  897 

young  ruler,  or  on  the  follower  who  a  moment  earlier  had 
forsworn  Him :  such  traits  of  nature  ajpear  with  simple 
and  vivid  power,  and  they  come  not  as  exterior  and 
official  evidences  of  a  humanity  which  needs  attestation 
but  as  the  spontaneous  outHow  of  a  human  life  that  can 
be  nothing  but  itself. 

Time  was  when  debate  gathered  keenly  round  the 
intellectual  experience  of  Jesus.  It  was  felt  to  be 
perilous  and  revolutionary  to  hold  that  the  normal 
limitations  of  knowledge  in  His  age  and  country  must 
in  some  true  sense  be  predicated  of  Hin.self.  The  diffi- 
culty was  rendered  none  the  less  acute  by  the  fact  that 
the  Gospels  quite  plainly  ascribe  to  Jesus  a  certain  range 
of  supernormal  discernment  both  of  human  thought  and 
of  future  events.  Still,  preternatural  knowledge,  such  as 
may  be  more  or  less  paralleled  from  the  life  of  Isaiah, 
Jeremiah,  or  St.  Paul,  cannot  be  regarded  as  the  equi- 
valent of  omniscience ;  and  omniscience  is,  after  all,  the 
only  possible  alternative  to  a  knowledge  qualified  by 
limitation.  The  question  can  be  decided  solely  by  loyalty 
to  facts ;  and  these,  it  is  not  too  much  to  say,  are  peremp- 
tory. Not  only  is  it  related  that  Jesus  asked  questions 
to  elicit  information — regarding  the  site  of  Lazarus'  tomb, 
for  example,  or  the  number  of  the  loaves,  or  the  name  of 
the  demented  Gadarene — but  at  one  point  there  is  a  clear 
acknowledgment  of  ignorance.  "  Of  that  day  or  that 
hour,"  He  said,  respecting  the  Parousia,  "  knoweth  no 
man,  not  even  the  angels  in  heaven,  neither  the  Son, 
but  the  Father."  ^  If  He  could  thus  be  ignorant  of  a  detail 
connected  in  some  measure  with  His  redemptive  work, 
the  conclusion  is  unavoidable  that  in  secular  affairs  His 
knowledge  was  but  the  knowledge  of  His  time.  It 
was  possible  for  Him  to  feel  surprise.  The  subject  is 
one,  however,  on  which  controversy  is  over  now.  Con- 
servative writers  freely  admit  the  obvious  significance  of 
the  narrated  facts.  "  That  our  Lord's  knowledge,"  Dr. 
Dykes  has  said,  "  advanced  from  infantile  ignorance,  and 

» Mk  IB^. 


398  THE   PERSON    OF    JESUS    CHRIST 

advanced  as  that  of  other  men  does  by  the  ordinary 
methods  by  which  men  gain  information ;  that  what  He 
thus  came  to  know  could  not  be  at  all  times  equally 
present  to  His  mind  and  was  wholly  absent  from  His 
mind  in  the  unconscious  intervals  of  slumber ; — this 
simply  follows  from  His  possession  of  a  human  mind  at 
all.  It  is  human  to  know  in  part,  to  retain  much  in 
memory  which  is  not  present  to  thought,  and  at  each 
moment  of  consciousness  to  attend  only  to  a  very  limited 
sum  of  impressions  and  ideas."  ^  In  a  recent  work,  Dr. 
Sanday  has  devoted  to  the  same  topic  a  few  pages  of  the 
highest  value.  "We  may  venture,"  he  writes,  "to  picture 
to  ourselves  the  working  of  our  Lord's  consciousness  in 
some  such  way  as  this.  His  life  on  earth  presented  all 
the  outward  appearance  of  the  life  of  any  other  con- 
temporary Galilean.  His  bodily  organism  discharged  the 
same  ordinary  functions  and  ministered  to  the  life  of 
the  soul  in  the  same  ordinary  ways.  He  had  the  same 
sensations  of  pleasure  and  pain,  of  distress  and  ease,  of 
craving  and  satisfaction.  Impressions  received  through 
the  senses  and  emotions  awakened  by  them  were  re- 
collected and  stored  up  for  use  by  the  same  wonderful 
processes  by  which  any  one  of  us  becomes  the  living 
receptacle  of  personal  experiences.  His  mind  played 
over  all  these  accumulated  memories,  sifting,  digesting, 
analysing,  extracting,  combining,  and  recombining.  Out 
of  such  constituent  elements,  physical,  rational,  moral, 
and  spiritual,  character  was  formed  in  Him  as  in  any 
one  of  ourselves,  though  with  unwonted  care  and  attention. 
Not  that  we  need  suppose  that  the  actual  process  of 
character-forming  was  more  self-conscious  with  Him  than 
it  is  with  us.  The  forming  of  character  is  the  un- 
conscious automatic  effect  of  particular  decisions  of 
judgment  and  acts  of  will.  Conscience  discriminates 
between  right  and  wrong ;  in  His  case  it  invariably 
chose  the  right  and  eschewed  the  wrong.  But  out  of  the 
midst  of  all  these  moral  decisions  and  actions,  out  of  the 

1  Ex^ws.  Times,  Jan.  1906,  152-63, 


HIS    RELIGIOUS    LIFE  399 

interplay  of  social  relations,  under  the  guidance  of 
observation  and  reflection,  there  gradually  grew  up  a 
sense  of  deliberate  purpose,  a  consciousness  of  mission."  ^ 

Attention  has  recently  been  drawn,  in  a  special  manner, 
to  the  perfectly  human  quality  of  our  Lord's  religious 
life.  The  vivid  simplicity  of  New  Testament  representa- 
tions has  been  felt  anew,  and,  like  the  writer  to  the 
Hebrews,  men  have  dwelt  on  the  piety  of  Jesus.  For 
long  it  had  been  half-forgotten  how  this  colours  His 
whole  experience.  Take  His  most  absorbing  affection,  from 
which  all  others  drew  their  strength  and  purity — His 
love  for  the  Father.  It  is  easy  to  read  the  Gospels  over 
and  over  again  and  yet  miss  the  greatness  of  this  love  as 
a  simple  consciousness,  an  atmosphere  in  which  all  action 
is  done  and  all  feeling  felt,  the  perpetual  bright  flower 
of  the  absolute  unity  of  will  between  the  Father  and  the 
Son,  Or  take  His  habit  of  prayer  and  faith,  of  asking 
and  receiving.  No  Christology  is  true  which  makes  a 
Christ  for  whom  prayer  is  either  unnatural  or  impossible.^ 
It  is  striking  that  the  Fourth  Gospel,  which  dwells  with 
such  steady  emphasis  on  His  higher  being,  should  exhibit 
Him  even  more  constantly  than  the  Synoptics  in  the 
posture  and  mood  of  prayer.  He  needs  God,  even  though 
sharer  of  His  life.  In  Hebrews,  too,  there  are  daring 
words  as  to  the  awful  struggle  in  Gethsemane,  and  the 
"  strong  crying  and  tears  unto  Him  that  was  able  to  save 
Him  from  death."  This  is  in  no  sense  incongruous  with 
the  power  that  dwelt  in  Him ;  for  prayer  is  the  one 
source  of  power.  He  is  so  great  amongst  men  because 
of  that  secret  communion.  Apart  from  God,  He  has  no 
thoughts,  no  desires,  no  will.  Along  with  this  is  combined 
a  faith  and  receptivity  which  is  not  that  of  a  frail  sinner, 
but  of  a  sinless  Son.  The  recurrence  of  the  sweet  and 
deep  name  Father  unveils  the  secret  of  His  being.     His 

^  Chridolijjics  Ancient  and  Modern,  179  ff. 

2  In  his  Von  der  Gottheit  Christi,  41  ff. ,  Thieme  argues  at  length  that 
Jesus'  habit  of  prayer  compels  us  to  reject  His  essential  unity  with  God  and 
assert  rather  a  rejjrestntativ.e  umtj .         . 


400  THE   PERSON    OF   JESUS    CHRIST 

heart  is  at  rest  in  God.  There  is  a  trust  born  of  communion 
with  the  Father  which  in  the  narrative  is  not  so  much  heard 
as  overheard — a  confidence  so  deep-set  and  immovable 
that  even  when  in  the  last  hour  it  could  find  in  the  words 
of  an  ancient  Psalmist  the  truest  symbol  and  expression 
of  inward  darkness,  it  yet  clung  passionately  to  the  unseen 
Lord  and  Friend.  Here  also  the  Fourth  Gospel  is  richest 
in  memories.  It  is  our  most  faithful  record  of  this  filial 
dependence.  "  The  Son  can  do  nothing  of  Himself,  but 
what  He  seeth  the  Father  doing " ;  "  He  that  hath  sent 
Me  is  with  Me,  He  hath  not  left  Me  alone  " ;  "  the  Father 
abiding  in  Me  doeth  His  works "  ^ — these  are  typical 
words  out  of  many,  and  through  them,  as  through  a 
transparent  medium,  we  perceive  that  the  focus  of  His 
life  and  consciousness  was  not  in  Himself  merely,  but  in 
His  unity  with  God.  Only  so  could  He  make  the  Father 
known.  Eevelation,  if  it  be  more  than  a  theoretic  verbal 
declaration,  must  come  through  an  absolute  reflection  of 
the  Fatlier  caught  by  and  flung  out  from  a  perfect  human 
soul,  in  whose  depths  men  should  read  and  love  it. 

The  manhood  of  Jesus,  then,  is  a  manhood  essentially 
one  with  ours.  His  life  is  a  distinctively  human 
phenomenon,  moving  always  within  the  lines  of  an 
authentically  human  mind  and  will,  and  constituting  thus 
a  revelation  of  God  in  humanity,  "  not  partly  in  it  and 
partly  out  of  it."  Yet  it  is  just  when  this  has  been 
made  clear  that  we  adequately  realise  the  wholly 
exceptional  quality  of  this  human  life.  Jesus  may  be 
described  as  ideal  or  normal  man  ;  but  these  just  epithets 
produce  a  totally  wrong  impression  if  we  do  not  add 
immediately  that  manhood  of  this  ideal  type  has  existed 
but  once  in  history.^  He  is  unique  in  virtue  of  His 
sinlessness — the   one    quite  unspotted    life  that  has    been 

1  Jn  rr^  8=9 1410. 

^  A  character  at  once  perfectly  ideal  and  completely  human  is  not  in- 
conceivable, as  has  been  maintained  ;  but  how  difficult  the  conception  is 
may  be  seen  from  the  fact  that  it  has  never  been  represented  with  success  in 


THE    SINLESSNESS    OF   JESUS  401 

lived  within  our  sinful  race.  The  deep  and  ineffaceable 
impression  made  by  Jesus  on  those  around  Him  cannot 
be  dismissed  as  illusory.  It  is  clear  that  His  own  con- 
sciousness of  sin,  had  it  existed,  however  faintly,  must 
have  affected  His  demeanour ;  that  His  followers  must 
have  observed  the  tokens  of  a  bad  conscience ;  and  that 
such  tokens,  had  they  been  present,  must  have  profoundly 
modified  their  view  of  Jesus.  No  one  doubts,  then,  that 
the  disciples  represented  Jesus  as  without  sin,  and  it  is 
morally  inconceivable  that  they  should  have  held  to  this 
belief  in  defiance  of  better  knowledge.  Once  the  fact  of 
His  sinlessness  has  been  apprehended,  however,  we  can 
put  forward  strong  antecedent  grounds  for  accepting  it. 
Only  a  sinless  person  can  guarantee  the  Divine  pardon 
of  sin.  If  redemption  is  to  be  achieved,  the  Eedeemer 
must  stand  free  of  moral  evil.  As  the  source  of  victorious 
spiritual  energy  He  must  Himself  be  in  utter  oneness 
with  the  will  of  God.  The  perfect  moral  health,  the 
u)]stained  conscience,  to  which  He  is  slowly  raising  others, 
must  be  present  absolutely  in  His  own  life.  If  He  shed 
His  blood  for  the  remission  of  sins,  it  is  because  He  is 
without  spot  or  blemish.  Like  to  His  brethren  in  all 
else.  He  is  unlike  them  here.  Yet  it  is  no  paradox  to 
say  that  such  unlikeness  makes  His  kinship  perfect ;  for 
sin  had  made  Him  not  more  a  man,  but  less.  Sin  de- 
humanises, and  by  its  entrance  the  perfection  of  His 
vital  sympathy  would  have  been  irrecoverably  lost. 

Just  here  is  our  problem.  As  the  record  proves, 
Jesus  underwent  repeated  and  acute  temptation  ;  tempted, 
we  feel,  He  must  have  been,  if  we  are  right  in  counting  on 
His  sympathy  in  the  struggle.  Yet  are  the  temptations 
of  the  sinless  real  ?  In  such  a  nature,  what  door  can  open 
and  let  in  the  base  allurement  ?  How  can  evil  find 
resonance  where  there  is  neither  inherited  bias  to  evil  nor 
weakness  due  to  previous  transgression  ? 

imaginative  literature.  Tennyson's  Arthur  and  Georf;e  Eliot's  Daniel 
Deronda  are  the  best-known  modern  failures.  Of  Jesus  only  can  it  be  said. 
Das  Uiizuldngliche,  hier  wird's  Ereigniss. 

26 


402  THE   PERSON    OF   JESUS    CHRIST 

Now  we   must  distinguish   clearly  between  temptation 
and  sin.      Temptation  has  become  actual  when  the  lower 
aim  is    felt  as  in   collision   with    the  higher ;   and   if    the 
lower  aim  be  justifiable  in  its  own  time  and  place,  as  an 
appeal  to  inborn  instinct,  the  felt  shock  of  both  within  the 
moral  consciousness  is  not  yet  sin.     Not  even  the  struggle 
that   may  ensue   is   sin.       But   sin   is   present   when    the 
decision  for  the  higher  fails,  or  comes  too  slowly.     Now 
Jesus'  nature,  being  integrally  human,  formed  a  medium 
through  which  the  solicitation  alike  of  higher  and  lower 
ends  came  knocking  at  His  heart.      It  may  well  be  that 
certain  species  of  temptation — to  forms  of  evil  we  name 
carnal — had  virtually  no  existence  for  His  mind.      If   it 
was  so,  His  redeeming  power  over  the  slaves  of  sensuality 
is  not    thereby  limited ;  for  to  the    completeness   of    the 
Redeemer  it  is  not  essential  that  He  should  undergo  each 
individual   temptation    by    which    men    may   be    assailed. 
What   is  essential    is    that    He   should   be   "  schooled "  in 
temptation,  should  taste  and  see  what  it  is  to  repel  the 
approach    of    evil   through   a  lowly  trust    in   God.      But 
however  this  may  be,  at  least  He  was  vulnerable  in  all  His 
normal     instincts,     emotions,     desires.      The     longing    for 
triumph ;  the  impulse  to  take  the  shortest  path  to  power ; 
a  fear  of  death  which  is  something  almost  wholly  physical ; 
a  shrinking   from  close  contact  with  sin- — these   natural, 
innocent     tendencies     and    the    like     supplied     very    real 
opportunities  of  rebellion.     They  constituted  what  Moberly 
has  called  "  the  external  capacity,  and  ae  it  were  machinery, 
for    selfishness " ;  they    meant     a    pressure    on    the    will 
against  which  force  must  be  exerted  in  steadfast  resistance 
and  with  a  real    pain  of    conflict.     Thus  the    Holy  One 
learned  obedience.      For  the  holiness  of  Jesus  was  no  auto- 
matic necessity  of  being.      It  was  possessed  only  by  being 
perpetually  won  anew,  in  a  dependence  of  self-committal 
which  had  indeed  no  relation  to  a  consciousness  of  sin,  as 
with  us,  but  which  rested  none  the  less  on  the  felt  need  of 
an  uninterrupted   derivation  of    life  and  power  from  the 
Father.      Precisely  how  this  reality  of  tempted  conflict  can 


THE    SINLESSNESS    OF    JESUS  403 

have  occurred  within  a  sinless  mind  is  uo  doubt  inscrutable. 
For  us  indeed  it  must  be  so ;  since  the  only  psychological 
analogies  we  can  use  have  their  origin  in  our  own  sinful 
experience.^ 

It  may  be  that  we  speak  too  much  of  Jesus'  conflict, 
forgetting  that  His  was  a  goodness  altogether  radiant, 
victorious,  full  of  charm.  Holiness  in  Him  revealed  that 
ease  and  mastery  which  belong  to  all  perfection  :  "  He  did 
the  most  wonderful  things  as  if  nothing  else  were  con- 
ceivable." Yet,  on  the  other  hand,  while  temptation  never 
made  appeal  in  Him  to  frailty  resulting  from  previous  sin, 
He  was  not  therefore  absolved  from  painful  effort.  Sin- 
less temptations  may  be  the  most  severe.  The  acquired 
appetite  of  the  drunkard  may  be  resisted  with  benefit  to 
himself ;  but  the  natural  appetite  of  thirst,  if  persistently 
denied  satisfaction,  will  prove  fatal.  Not  only  so ;  but  the 
resistance  of  temptation  may  be  torture  to  a  good  man,^ 
whereas  a  bad  man  yields  easily.  In  the  light  of  these 
things  we  can  see  that  our  Lord,  sinless  as  He  was,  had  no 
exemption  from  keen  and  cruel  warfare.  None  was  ever 
tempted  so  subtly,  and  triumph  came  through  agony. 
Thus  the  great  High  Triest  of  men  gained  an  inner  view 
of  the  tempted  life,  and  can  be  touched  with  a  feeling  of 
our  infirmities. 

No  miracle  of  Christ  equals  the  miracle  of  His  sinless 
hfe.  To  be  holy  in  all  thought  and  feeling  ;  never  to  fail  in 
duty  to  others,  never  to  transgress  the  law  of  perfect  love 
to  God  or  man,  never  to  exceed  or  to  come  short — this  is  a 
condition  outstripping  the  power  of  imagination  and  almost 
of  belief.     Here  is  a  casement  opening  on  a  Diviner  world. 

But  it  is  essential  that  we  should  not  leave  the  sin- 
lessness  of  Jesus  as  a  bare,  uninterpreted  fact.  Plainly 
it  is  in  no  sense  self-explanatory.  It  asks  for  deeper 
elucidation  and  analysis.  And  rellection  proves  that  the 
ground  or  reason  of  it  must  be  sought  in  our  Lord's  unique 

^  Ultimately,  it  may  be  argued,  the  complete  certainty  that  Jesus  never 
sinned  is  given  by  our  faith  in  His  person  ;  for  there  is  no  way  of  proving 
experimentally  the  impossibility  of  a  fact. 


>^ 


404  THE    PERSON    OF   JESUS    CHRIST 

relation  to  God.  The  moral  transcendence  of  Jesus'  life  is 
unintelligible  save  as  it  originated  in,  and  was  nourished 
by,  a  vital  and  organic  connection  with  the  Father,  who 
alone  is  holy  with  the  holiness  manifest  in  Jesus.  It  is 
vain  to  speak  of  Him  simply  as  different  from  others  in 
degree ;  the  difference  is  one  of  type.  When  we  ask  why 
He  uniformly  triumphed  over  sin,  whereas  we  fail,  the 
answer,  as  we  shall  see,  must  lie  in  that  element  of  His 
being  in  virtue  of  which  He  is  one  with  God.^  Or,  to  put 
it  otherwise,  by  the  side  of  yet  suffused  with  those 
qualities  in  Christ  which  we  are  summoned  to  imitate  and 
reproduce,  and  which  reveal  Him  as  the  pattern  of  filial  life, 
we  discern  a  yet  more  august  quality — inimitable,  solitary, 
supreme.  It  is  a  new  and  lonely  type  of  spiritual  con- 
sciousness, an  unshared  relation  of  identity  with  the  Father. 
Divinity  is  here  the  source  and  basis  of  perfect  manhood. 

And  the  bearing  of  all  this  on  personal  religion  ? 
Has  faith  a  vital  stake  in  the  complete  yet  wholly  ex- 
ceptional humanity  of  Jesus  Christ  ?  Only  a  partial 
answer  can  be  attempted  now.  The  true  manhood  of 
Jesus  is  of  cardinal  significance  in  four  ways. 

(1)  It  guarantees  a  veritable  incarnation.  If  the 
manhood  of  Christ  is  unreal,  at  any  remotest  point, 
God  has  not  quite  stooped  to  unity  with  man.  He  has 
not  come  so  low  as  we  require  ;  there  has  been  reservation 
and  refusal  ;  some  part  of  our  burden,  after  all,  has  been 
left  untouched.  "  The  uuassumed  is  the  unhealed."  In 
that  case,  no  matter  from  what  height  Christ  came.  He 
has  not  reached  to  tis,  but  has  stopped  short.  "  A  little 
less,  and  what  worlds  away  ! "  But  it  has  not  been  so. 
The  centre  of  the  catholic  faith  is  that  God  in  Christ  came 
the  whole  way  :  "  forasmuch  as  the  children  were  sharers  in 
flesh  and  blood.  He  also  in  like  manner  partook  of  the  same." 
He  drew  near  in  person,  that  we  might  clasp  Him  as  a 
kinsman  in  our  arms,  and  feel  the  Infinite  One  to  be  our 
own.  This  has  touched  men  most,  breaking  the  world's 
^  Cf.  infra,  chap.  vii. 


PERSONAL    RELIGION    AND    JESUS*    MANHOOD      405 

hard  heart.  The  measure  of  Jesus'  humauity  is  the 
measure  of  God's  love.  xVs  it  has  been  put,  "  love  is  not 
iu  full  possession  until  it  can  fully  display  itself";  and  as 
Christ  passed  from  depth  to  depth,  entering  one  chamber 
after  another  of  human  experience,  and  submitting  at 
length  to  dealh  itself.  He  gave  a  proof  of  Divine  love  than 
which  nothing  greater  can  be  conceived.^  Any  other 
reading  of  the  Gospel,  such  as  that  of  modern  liberalism, 
ofifers  a  great  view  of  God's  love,  but  not  the  greatest  we 
can  imagine.  That  we  find  only  in  the  Life  truly  in- 
carnate. So  that  the  reality  of  the  manhood  is  cardinal. 
There  was  a  day,  not  long  past,  when  prophetic  inspiration 
was  thought  of  as  submerging  and  all  but  obliterating  the 
prophet's  consciousness.  Of  him  it  might  be  said :  the 
more  a  seer,  the  less  a  man.  We  have  learnt  that  this  is 
really  unethical,  and  that  on  these  lines  no  sort  of  justice 
can  be  done  to  moral  personality.  So  there  are  ways  of 
conceiving  the  advent  of  God  in  human  life  which  frankly 
supersede  the  finitely  personal,  making  human  powers  no 
more  than  selfless  organs  of  Deity.  But  to  redeem  us 
God  must  not  merely  express  Himself;  He  must  express 
Himself  in  terms  of  an  experience  which  is  our  own. 

(2)  It  provides  an  essential  basis  of  atonement.  All 
true  Christian  ideas  in  regard  to  atonement  may  be  viewed 
as  aspects  of  Jesus'  self-identification  with  the  sinful.  If 
then  He  who  lived  and  died  for  men  had  Himself  been 
man  only  in  seeming,  or  in  part,  no  expiation  were  after 
all  made  in  our  name ;  for  only  He  can  act  with  God  for 
man  who  speaks  from  man's  side.  It  is  as  Christ  became 
our  fellow,  moving  in  a  true  manhood  through  obedience, 
conflict,  and  death,  that  He  entered  into  our  condition  fully 
and  availed  in  our  behalf  to  receive  from  God's  hand  the 
suffering  in  which  is  expressed  the  Divine  judgment  upon 
sin.     Jesus'  manhood  is  the  corner-stone  of  reconciliation. 

(3)  It  secures  the  reality  of  a  perfect  example.  Jesus 
is  our  pattern  in  faith  and  prayer ;  but  it  cannot  be  too 
clearly  understood  that  no  act  can  be  exemplary  which  is 

'  Cf.  Macgregor,  Jesus  Christ  the  Son  of  God,  204. 


406  THE    PERSON    OF    JESUS    CHRIST 

not  first  of  all  dutiful.  The  human  Christ  prayed,  not  in 
order  that  He  might  furnish  a  model  to  His  disciples,  but 
because  to  Him  prayer  was  an  inward  need  and  duty.  So 
profound  and  unmanning  was  His  fear  in  Gethsemane 
that  like  the  children  of  men  He  took  refuge  under  God's 
shadow,  and  was  heard  for  His  reverent  trust.  In  our 
temptations  it  is  everything  to  know  that  He  also  was 
tempted.  And  here  that  sinless  manhood,  which  has 
seemed  at  times  to  remove  Him  from  us,  and  to  make 
sympathy  impossible,  reveals  itself  as  the  nerve  and  spring 
of  His  redemptive  power.  It  is  not,  one  may  surmise,  to 
those  who  themselves  once  fell  in  drunkenness  or  lust 
that  frail  men  and  women  instinctively  look  for  aid  and 
hope ;  it  is  rather  to  those  who,  although  schooled  in 
fellow-feeling  by  temptation,  have  kept  their  virtue  pure. 
So  Jesus'  victory  constitutes  Him  the  source  of  victory 
for  men ;  in  Him,  if  we  may  put  it  so.  Divine  grace  is 
humanised,  and  made  available  for  sinners.  Abstract 
ethical  and  religious  truth  may  prove  lacking  in  power 
to  sustain  the  will ;  whereas  it  wins  us  as  both  vital  and 
vitalising  when  embodied  in  a  living  form.  In  the  Son  of 
Man,  the  Word  made  flesh,  perfect  righteousness  is  put 
within  the  range  of  trust  and  love.  The  fruits  of  the 
Spirit  are  but  the  aspects  of  Jesus'  character. 

(4)  It  points  to  our  eternal  destiny.  It  is  because 
Jesus  the  Man  has  risen  from  the  grave  and  passed  to  a 
transcendent  life  with  God  that  we  too  may  triumph  in 
prospect  over  death.  As  St.  Paul  has  expressed  it,  with 
his  most  delicate  precision  in  the  use  of  our  Lord's  names, 
"  if  we  believe  that  Jesus  died  and  rose  again,  even  so 
them  also  which  sleep  in  Jesus  shall  God  bring  with  Him." 
For  the  resurrection  of  Jesus,  our  human  Surety  and 
Comrade,  is  a  test  case ;  and  as  such  it  has  fixed  a 
principle,  revealing  as  it  does  how  the  Father's  love  and 
power  will  deal  with  all  believers.  Thus  once  more  the 
central  significance  of  Christ's  true  humanity  is  manifest. 
On  its  integrity  and  perfect  wholeness  rest  for  us  the 
unspeakable  consolations  of  faith  in  a  blessed  immortality. 


CHAPTER  VII. 

THE  DIVINITY  OF  CHRIST. 

In  the  foregoing  chapters  we  have  essayed  to  bring  out  in 
order  the  immediate  certainties  of  the  believing  mind  as 
it  apprehends  the  person  of  Jesus.  Three  points  have  so 
far  been  ascertained.  First,  the  distinctive  attitude  of 
believers  to  Jesus  is  that  of  faith.  Secondly,  in  its  most 
characteristic  moments  He  is  beheld  as  the  Risen  One, 
exalted  and  transcendent  above  all  limits  of  space  and 
time.  Thirdly,  He  is  recognised  as  perfect  Man.  In  the 
last  analysis  each  of  these  three  points  is  vital — each 
involves  and  is  involved  in  the  otliers.  In  the  present 
chapter  our  scrutiny  of  the  intuitive  affirmations  of  faith 
is  completed,  and  we  endeavour  to  signalise  the  truth  that 
it  spontaneously  regards  Christ  as  the  personal  manifesta- 
tion of  God  in  human  form.  Prior  to  all  theories  of  the 
fact  stands  this  spiritual  assurance  that  He  is  Divine. 
It  will  appear  that  this  is  less  a  new  additional  result — 
though  it  may  be  stated  with  a  new  emphasis — than  the 
one  adequate  method  in  which  previous  results  can  be 
formulated. 

The  question  of  Christ's  divinity,  as  a  doctrinal  issue, 
may  obviously  be  approached  from  more  than  one  side.  It 
may    be    approached,   for   example,    by  way    of    it   i^riori 

Literature — Reville,  History  of  the  Dogma  of  the  Deity  of  Jesus  Christ, 
1878  ;  Dale,  Christian  Doctrine,  1894  ;  Herrmann,  Communion  with  God, 
1906  ;  Gore,  Bamptan  Lectures,  1891  ;  Contentio  Veritatis,  1907  ;  Isitzsch, 
Evangelische  Dogmatik^,  1896  ;  Kunze,  Dicewigc  Gottheit  Jesu  Christi,  1904  ; 
Fairbairn,  Christ  in  Modem  Theology,  189.3  ;  Liddon,  Divinity  of  our  Lard, 
1867;  Dykes  in  Expository  Times,  Oct.  1905-Jan.  1906;  Thienie,  Von  der 
Gottheit  Christi,  1911. 

407 


408  THE   PERSON   OF   JESUS    CHRIST 

postulate.  Starting  from  the  human  need  of  redemption, 
the  theologian  may  inquire  how  the  Eedeemer's  person 
must  be  constituted  in  order  to  satisfy  this  need,  arriving 
finally  at  the  conclusion  that  since  only  God  can  redeem, 
Christ  must  be  a  God-man,  in  whom  divinity  and  humanity 
are  combined.  Clearly,  however,  this  severely  logical 
procedure,  of  which  the  Cur  Deus  Homo  of  Anselm  is 
the  best-known  instance,  provides  no  independently  real 
guarantee  of  truth.  Like  the  ontological  proof  of  God, 
it  is  a  piece  of  purely  conceptual  argumentation,  not  indeed 
without  utility  as  giving  to  our  thought  direction  and 
expectancy,  but  incapable  by  itself  of  convincing  modern 
minds.  To  fix  our  idea  of  Christ  by  logic,  even  if  our 
point  of  departure  be  the  infinite  gravity  of  sin,  must  be 
described  as  an  infidelity  to  the  fundamental  principle  that 
Christology  is  always  experimental,  and  that  the  relevant 
experience  is  kindled  by  the  touch  of  fact.  The  real 
Christ  is  given  in  history,  not  constructed  in  the  laboratory 
of  consciousness. 

The  second  method  is  the  experiential.  Not  the  need 
of  redemption  but  the  fact  of  redeemed  souls  is  the  datum. 
Taking  a  line  laid  down  by  Schleiermacher,  the  argument 
moves  back  from  the  influence  of  Jesus  on  men  to  the 
character  of  His  person  as  influential  cause.  Of  this  Man 
who  does  a  Divine  work  upon  us — opening  to  the  estranged 
a  way  into  God's  communion,  making  goodness  an  assured 
career — we  have  no  option  but  to  predicate  personal 
Godhead.  The  Eedeemer  is  as  the  redemption.  "We  have 
already  seen  that  as  a  mode  of  proceeding  this  is  quite 
essential  to  a  spiritual  conception  of  Christ.  By  any  other 
route  we  reach  only  historical  information  or  statutory 
dogma.  True  faith  in  Jesus'  higher  nature  is  a  personal 
confession.  It  is  the  result  of  our  finding  in  Him  "  the 
presence  and  power  of  what  declares  itself  to  be  not  less 
than  God  Himself."  Apart  from  this,  there  is  no  recog- 
nisable reality  in  the  doctrine  of  His  Godhead. 

Yet  we  must  not  too  hastily  conclude  that  an 
experiential    view  is    self-sufficient    as  it   stands,    with    a 


SOURCES    OF    BELIEF  409 

cogency  which  requires  no  reference  to  the  trans-subjective 
sphere  of  things.  After  all,  the  primal  and  creative  source 
of  belief  concerning  Jesus  is  recorded  fact.  Hence  the 
question  of  Ilis  divinity  has  in  recent  times  been 
approached  chietiy  from  the  side  of  His  self-consciousness 
as  unfolded  in  the  Gospels.  We  are  justified  in  assuming 
that  in  works  and  life  and  word  Jesus  veritably  revealed 
His  inmost  being.  No  assertion  of  His  loftier  nature  is 
tenable  which  is  out  of  relation  to  His  convictions  about 
Himself ;  if  to  the  end  He  remained  personally  unconscious 
of  transcendent  oneness  with  God,  our  affirmation  of  it 
will  produce  no  impression.  The  final  court  of  appeal, 
therefore,  is  Jesus'  witness  to  Himself  as  echoed  and 
apprehended  by  the  believing  mind.  Faith  is  a  response 
to  His  self-presentation.  We  are  obliged  to  call  Jesus 
what  He  called  Himself  and  what  the  new  life  He  inspires 
proves  Him  to  have  been. 

As  to  the  fact  that  Jesus  constrains  men  to  assert  His 
Godhead — constrains  them  alike  by  His  self-revelation 
and  by  His  redeeming  intiuence  in  their  lives — no  question 
is  really  possible.  In  believing  Him  to  be  God  the 
Christian  consciousness  may  be  right  or  wrong,  but  that 
it  does  actually  believe  this  is  incontestable.  It  knows 
Him  as  supreme,  transcendent,  and  only  to  be  adored. 
No  one  will  plead  ,that  a  consideration  of  this  sort  covers 
or  vindicates  the  countless  subtle  refinements  of  ecclesiastical 
Christology ;  none  the  less,  however,  it  points  with  un- 
wavering conviction  to  what  is  properly  the  heart  and 
substance  of  Christological  belief,  the  truth  that  Christ 
is  God  incarnate.  To  this  the  Church  has  expressly 
committed  itself  age  after  age.  Not  indeed  that  faith  is 
always  fully  aware  how  much  is  involved  in  giving  Christ, 
experimentally,  the  highest  place.  Even  under  strong 
pressure,  men  have  frequently  chosen  to  ignore  the 
intellectual  conclusions  in  which  religious  practice  ought 
reasonably  to  terminate.  Moral  acceptance  of  Christ's 
divinity,  combined  with  a  refusal  to  acquiesce  in  its 
explicit  affirmation,  is  no  unfamiliar  plienomenon.     It  may 


410  THE    PERSON    OF    JESUS    CHRIST 

be  due  to  philosophical  agnosticism  in  part,  or  to  a 
conception  of  God  more  ontological  than  ethical  which 
on  that  account  is  felt  to  have  no  recognisable  oneness  or 
identity  with  the  historic  Jesus.  Whatever  the  cause,  at 
least  it  is  certain  that  many  sincere  minds  to-day  are 
conscious  of  perplexity  and  reluctance  when  presented 
with  credal  statements  that  in  very  truth  "  God  was 
in  Christ."  As  a  symbol  or  metaphor  dimly  shadowing 
the  greatness  of  His  redemptive  powers  they  are  eager 
to  accept  these  words.  But  they  are  staggered  by  the 
doctrine,  as  a  doctrine,  that  Christ  is  personally  one  with 
the  Highest. 

Nevertheless,  if  we  may  not  rest  in  an  eventual  antinomy 
which  holds  religious  and  intellectual  convictions  apart  for 
ever,  it  is  incumbent  on  us  to  enunciate  the  right  conclusion 
which  follows  from  Jesus'  felt  power  in  life.  What  He 
is  to  us  reveals  what  He  is  truly  in  Himself ;  and  the 
revelation  may  and  must  be  put  in  words.  Our  findings 
in  earlier  parts  of  the  argument  leave  us  no  choice.  Thus, 
it  may  be  remembered,  we  were  led  to  the  conclusion 
that  Christian  Theology  must  embrace  Christology  as  a 
vital  and  integral  constituent ;  but  Christology  is  only  a 
reasoned  account  of  how  the  Man  Jesus  has  for  us  the 
value  and  reality  of  God.  Christ  is  part  of  what  believers 
mean  by  "  Godhead " ;  and  this  fact,  which  merely  as 
a  fact  is  unquestioned,  must  be  taken  seriously  in  our 
doctrinal  formulations.  Again,  the  moral  authority  of 
Christ  presents  itself  in  the  Christian  conscience  as  invested 
with  absolute  supremacy,  as  infinite  with  the  infinitude  of 
God ;  also  a  fact  which  insists  on  doctrinal  interpretation. 
It  means  that  the  voice  of  Jesus  finds  us  at  depths  of  our 
being  accessible  to  God  only.  Again,  we  have  an  intuition 
of  Divine  suffering  in  the  cross.  Involuntarily  we  are 
made  aware  in  presence  of  Christ's  passion  that  it  is  God 
Himself  who  bears  our  sin  and  carries  our  sorrow ;  that 
the  judgment  upon  evil  uttered  at  Calvary  is  manifested 
through  suffering  veritably  Divine,  and  that  Christ  shares 
the    Divine   life  He    thus  pours  out   for  sinners.     Again, 


EXPERIENCE    AND    CHRIST's    GODHEAD  411 

Christ  abides  within  His  people,  Ilis  life  pervading  theirs 
with  a  creative  underived  power ;  but  this  capacity  to 
inhabit  the  inner  man,  kindling  life  by  an  originating 
impulse,  is  clearly  something  not  predicable  of  a  simply 
human  personality.  If  He  be  the  Giver  of  a  Divine 
spiritual  energy,  how  escape  the  assurance  that  He  is 
Himself  Divine  ?  Or  if  He  reveals  the  Father  perfectly, 
must  He  not  participate  by  right  of  nature  in  that  which 
He  reveals  ?  Finally,  we  arrived  at  the  clear  position 
that  specifically  Christian  faith  in  God  the  Father  is  linked 
indissociably  to  faith  in  Christ  the  Son.  Without  any 
duplication  of  the  object  grasped  by  faith — which  would 
be  polytheism — believers  cast  themselves  down  into  the 
depths  of  Christ's  compassion,  and  in  Him  find  rest  for 
their  souls.  Yet  nothing  can  be  more  certain  than  that 
in  this  sense  Christians  can  believe  in  God  only. 

How  shall  we  describe  this  wondrous  Person,  in  whom  . 
these  attributes  of  power  and  supremacy  are  found,  this 
Jesus  who  transmits  a  life  no  one  else  had  transmitted  to 
Him  ?  He  is  highest  in  the  highest  realm  we  know ; 
through  Him,  as  first  cause,  our  race  has  received  the 
creative  inflow  of  the  Unseen  pouring  from  fountains  of 
the  great  deep.  Which  is  the  right  predicate  ?  How 
name  the  Presence  that  constitutes  Him  our  Eedeemer  ? 
Surely  it  is  very  God  Himself.  Nor  in  His  case  can  we 
employ  that  supreme  term  seriously  except  as  we  employ 
it  in  its  loftiest  meaning ;  conscience  will  be  put  off 
with  nothing  less,  for  conscience  is  monotheistic  through 
and  through.  "  The  supreme  thing,"  it  has  been  said,  "  is 
for  Christ  to  be  really  God  to  the  affections,  the  conscience, 
and  the  will.  He  whom  I  obey  as  the  supreme  authority 
over  my  life.  He  whom  I  trust  for  the  pardon  of  my  sins. 
He  to  whom  I  look  for  the  power  to  live  righteously,  .  .  . 
He,  by  whatever  name  I  may  call  Him,  is  my  God.  If  I 
attribute  the  name  to  another,  I  attribute  to  Christ  the 
reality  for  which  the  name  stands :  and  unless,  for  me, 
Christ  is  one  with  the  Eternal,  He  is  really  above  the 
Eternal — has  Diviner    prerogatives  and    achieves   Diviner 


412  THE   PERSON   OF   JESUS    CHRIST 

works."  ^  We  cannot  debar  Hira  from  the  highest  place. 
The  hypothesis  that  while  more  than  man  He  is  less  than 
God,  has  lost  all  interest  for  the  human  mind.  That  issue 
was  fought  to  a  finish,  and  will  not  be  reopened ;  all  agree 
that  with  the  victory  of  Arius  the  Church  would  have  sunk 
into  polydemonistic  heathenism.  Faith  knows  its  Lord  as 
Divine  equally  in  value  and  fact- — not  a  higher  angelic 
visitant,  not  a  man  sainted  or  deified,  but  a  historic 
incarnation  of  the  only  God  there  is. 

So  far  we  have  searched  for  the  exact  descriptive  term 
apposite  to  One  who  does  for  us  a  specific  service  and 
sustains  towards  us  a  specific  relation.  By  simple  tran- 
script of  experience  we  predicate  of  Christ  true  deity. 
Nothing  more  high  is  possible,  nothing  lower  is  veracious. 
But  this  immediate  utterance  of  faith  is  found  on  examina- 
tion to  harmonise  with  the  only  admissible  interpretation 
of  certain  notable  features  of  our  Lord's  human  experience. 
That  unique  manhood  asks  to  be  explained  in  the  sense 
that  we  are  bound  to  seek  for  its  dynamic  ground  and 
sufficient  reason.  To  stand  before  the  fact  of  Christ  dumb 
and  uniuquiring  is  impossible.  Nor  is  it  enough  to  pro- 
nounce Him  only  an  exception  to  the  normal  course  of 
things,  a  variation,  a  mysterious  and  inscrutable  Solitary 
who  is  dispensed  unaccountably  from  our  conditions.  This 
is  to  restate  the  problem,  not  solve  it. 

I  would  single  out  three  distinct  aspects  of  Christ's 
unique  humanity  which  are  intelligible  only  if  construed 
as  based  upon  and  vitally  conditioned  by  His  true  God- 
head. These  are  His  siulessness,  His  special  Sonship,  and 
His  transcendent  risen  life. 

(a)  Jesus'  complete  freedom  from  sin  is  obviously  more 
than  a  moral  accident  without  parallel  before  or  since. 
In  the  supreme  point  of  view — that  of  the  Divine  purpose 
to  save  men — His  complete  victory  over  sin  is  not  some- 
thing merely  which  happened ;  it  is  something  which 
was   bound    to   happen.       Faith   cannot   acquiesce  in    the 

^  Dale,  Christian  Doctrine,  313. 


SINLESSNESS    IS    DIVINE  413 

thought  that  conceivably  the  .Divine  redeeming  plan  might 
have  been  frustrated  ;  yet  frustration  would  have  been  had 
Jesus  yielded  to  temptation  even  once.  On  the  otlier  hand, 
the  realisation  of  a  plan  which  is  Divine  is  necessarily 
due  to  God ;  to  God's  presence  in  Christ,  accordingly,  we 
must  ascril)e  the  stainlessness  of  His  career.  It  was  not 
humanity  which  achieved  its  own  salvation,  using  this 
particular  member  of  the  race  as  agent  or  medium ;  re- 
demption as  a  whole  and  in  every  stage  is  something  of 
which  God  properly  is  Doer,  by  whom  each  decisive  saving 
act  is  done.  And  this  means  that  all  hung  upon  Jesus' 
sinless  fulfilment  of  His  vocation,  while  yet  if  that  fulfil- 
ment w^as  to  issue  in  salvation  it  could  never  be  the  in- 
dividual unauthorised  exploit  of  a  man,  but  the  outcome 
rather  of  a  thought  and  energy  in  which  was  moving  the 
very  life  of  God. 

Not  only  so ;  but  a  study  of  what  we  may  call  the 
life-history  of  sinlessness — all  that  mediates  it  as  a  quality 
of  adult  consciousness — shows  it  to  be  possible  only  in 
One  whose  interconnection  with  the  tissue  and  fibre  of 
human  life  is,  somehow,  conditioned.  For  when  in  us 
the  stage  of  infancy  passes  into  childhood,  the  marks  of 
congenital  imperfection  are  already  evident.  Sin  in  us 
may  be  described  as  a  thing  of  nature — of  a  nature  radi- 
cally social  in  antecedents  and  environment — before  it  is 
a  thing  of  full  conscious  volition.  Now  the  mature  adult 
life  of  Christ  was  pure  from  all  trace  of  sin,  which  means 
that  in  His  case  this  initial  derangement  or  sickness  of 
soul  was  absent  wholly ;  during  the  months  and  years  of 
the  soul's  awakening  those  strong  efficacious  germs  of  evil 
which  unfailingly  develop  within  us  later,  left  Him  un- 
touched. In  other  words,  there  was  that  in  Him  from 
the  first  which  offered  a  completely  effective  resistance 
to  the  corrupt  influence  of  environment,  obviated  the  dis- 
turbance of  His  perfect  spiritual  growth,  and  secured  the 
inner  fount  of  subseriuent  feeling  and  will  from  all  defile- 
ment. Hence,  when  the  infant  Christ  woke  up  gradually 
into   clear  ethical   experience,  it   was   with   a  nature  un- 


414  THE    PERSON    OF    JESUS    CHRIST 

tainted,  immaculate,  nowise  handicapped  from  the  very 
outset  by  seeds  of  evil  already  germinating  in  the  soil 
of  character.  In  all  others  the  earliest  stirrings  of  self- 
consciousness  are  vitiated  by  a  hereditary  disposition  to 
go  wrong ;  in  Christ  this  predisposition  is  non-existent,  for 
in  our  human  circumstances  a  sinless  personality  cannot 
be  preceded  by  a  sinful  infancy.  How  shall  we  account 
for  this  quite  exceptional  life-story  ?  If  we  feel  dissatisfied 
with  agnosticism  or  with  a  merely  positive  acknowledg- 
ment of  the  exceptionalness  as  a  fact,  if  we  wish  to  see  it 
based  in  some  real  intelligible  ground,  this,  it  appears, 
can  only  lie  in  Jesus'  possession  of  some  inward  and 
essential  relationship  with  God,  a  living  actuality  which 
formed  the  conditioning  i^''^^^'-^  of  His  ethical  self-determina- 
tion, and  gave  rise  to  such  formative  impulses  as  secured 
that  He  should  pass  through  the  immaturities  of  childhood 
with  an  undiminished  and  unimpeded  capacity  to  accom- 
plish His  redeeming  task.  Not  indeed  that  Jesus'  unity 
with  God  is  a  natural  phenomenon,  manifesting  itself  by 
(as  it  were)  purely  mechanical  automatisms.  His  original 
oneness  with  God  stands  here  solely  for  the  potentiality 
and  basis  of  sinless  manhood ;  but  it  stands  for  nothing 
less  than  this.  The  sinless  preface  to  a  sinless  adult  life 
is  in  itself  suggestive  of  a  vital  and  inherent  identity 
with  the  Divine.  "  It  is  a  miracle,"  Kahler  has  said, 
"  which  you  cannot  explain  merely  by  an  uncorrupted 
basis  of  nature.  It  is  intelligible  only  if  this  Child 
entered  on  earthly  existence  with  other  contents  of 
personal  life  given  Him  from  the  beginning  than  we 
all ;  if  in  all  forms  and  at  every  stage  of  His  soul-life 
there  was  working  itself  out  an  unconditionally  inde- 
pendent Will,  if  God's  grace  and  truth  are  become  flesh 
in  Him."  ^  This  means,  in  psychological  terms,  that  from 
outset  to  end  no  desire,  motion,  conception,  or  resolve 
existed  in  the  soul  of  Jesus  which  was  not  the  affirmation 
and  execution  of  the  will  of  God,  dwelling  in  Him  and 
informing  His  entire  life.      Only  one  limit  to  God's  pres- 

'  Der  aoyeiMant   historische  Jesus^,  54. 


PERFECT   SONSHIP    IS    DIVINE  415 

ence  in  Him  remained — the  limit  of  finitudc.  In  His 
every  act,  "  in  the  patience  and  the  venture  and  the  sacri- 
fice of  self  which  lost  life  only  to  find  it,"  we  behold 
adoringly  the  human  life  of  God. 

(b)  The  Gospels  reveal  Jesus  as  living  in  a  relation 
toward  the  Father  of  peculiar  intimacy.  It  is  a  relation 
which  He  Himself  designates  as  that  of  Sonship,  but  the 
Sonship  is  such  as  to  be  per  se  unattainable  by  others ; 
"  as  there  is  only  one  Person  who  can  be  called  the  Father, 
so  there  is  only  one  who  can  be  called  the  Son."  ^  The 
consciousness  of  thus  belonging  to  God  dates  at  all  events 
from  the  Baptism.  Many  great  sayings  of  Christ  evidently 
presuppose  this  impassable  difference  between  the  Son  and 
all  mankind.  Moreover,  He  at  no  time  leaves  it  doubt- 
ful that  this  His  peculiar  Sonship  is  the  medium  to  the 
world  of  God's  redeeming  life.  Sonship,  that  is,  is  not 
something  which  denotes  and  interprets  His  likeness  to 
the  men  around  Him — His  presence  on  their  plane,  His 
temptability,  His  lowliness,  the  limitations  of  His  know- 
ledge ;  it  is  something  which  signalises  His  distinction 
from  them,  His  incomparable  and  transcendent  dignity. 
Not  because  but  though  He  was  a  Son,  He  learned  obedi- 
ence through  suffering.  The  term  certainly  implies  sub- 
ordination ;  none  the  less  it  points  to  and  emphasises  an 
unshared  position  of  nearness  to  God  by  which  His  very 
person  was  constituted.  All  this  comes  to  the  surface  in 
the  greatest  Christological  passage  in  the  New  Testament, 
Mt  1 125-30^  the  climax  of  Jesus'  witness  to  Himself.  In 
spite  of  attempts  to  re-write  these  verses,  we  are  justified 
in  saying  that  the  knowledge  of  God  professed  by  Jesus 
is  conceived  exclusively  as  given  in  and  with  His  filial 
consciousness.  He  does  not  mean  to  tell  us  how  the  Son 
came  to  know  the  Father,  any  more  than  how  the  Father 
came  to  know  the  Son.  He  is  speaking  of  a  knowledge 
possessed  by  the  Son,  qua  Son.  As  the  context  indicates, 
it  is  a  knowledge  of  the  Father  which  comprehends  His 
formerly  incompletely  revealed  purpose  to  save  men,  and 

^  Denney,  Jesiis  and  the  Gospel,  268. 


416  THE    PERSON    OF   JESUS    CHRIST 

of  the  Divine  will  and  nature  of  which  that  purpose,  now 
realised  in  Jesus,  is  a  manifestation.  In  communicating 
to  sinful  men  what  they  can  receive  of  this  life-giving 
truth,  Jesus  is  the  Father's  perfect  organ,  the  measure 
of  His  perfectness  being  stated  in  the  unqualified  and 
quite  amazing  words :  "  No  one  knoweth  the  Son  save 
the  Father."  There  is  that  in  Jesus  which  is  so  great,  so 
worthy  of  His  mission,  so  infinite,  that  it  is  comprehended 
by  the  Father  only. 

It  is  then  agreed  on  all  hands  that  Jesus  lived  in 
a  perfect  reciprocal  understanding  with  God ;  it  is  agreed, 
further,  that  according  to  the  documents  this  Sonship 
signified  for  Jesus'  own  mind  a  unique  and  incommunicable 
relation  to  God  and  man.  Assuming  the  truth  of  Jesus' 
interpretation,  how  far  does  a  relationship  carry  with 
it  a  theory  of  its  own  nature  ?  Is  it  a  simple  fact  not 
admitting  of  deeper  scrutiny ;  a  fact  to  be  accepted,  not 
explained  ?  Is  the  Sonship  exhausted  in  Jesus'  mental 
experience  of  it,  or  is  that  mental  experience  itself  the 
phenomenon,  the  symptom  and  manifestation,  of  an  un- 
created noumenal  reality  ? 

The  point  is  one  of  difficulty.  Thus  by  many  writers 
the  Sonship  of  Christ  is  virtually  defined  as  the  equivalent 
of  His  feeling  of  unity  with  God ;  He  was  Son  because 
He  knew  God  in  a  specific  manner — that  of  uninterrupted 
filial  communion.  Dissatisfied  with  this,  others  have 
insisted  that  behind  the  will  and  thought  of  Jesus  stood 
a  Divine  substance  or  nature,  of  which  will  and  thought 
are  but  attributes,  and  which  is  somehow  real  apart  from 
them.  This,  however,  is  equally  unsatisfactory  with  the 
position  it  controverts,  and  indeed  has  no  meaning  except 
on  the  assumption  that  substance  as  a  category  is  higher 
and  more  adequate  than  Subject,  or  intelligent  conscious 
Will — a  view  against  which  the  history  of  philosophy 
since  Kant  has  been  one  long  and  convincing  protest,  if 
we  have  learnt  anything  from  the  modern  criticism  of 
categories,  it  surely  is  that  no  category  can  be  higher 
than  personality  or  self-consciousness.     For  us,  then,  the 


SONSHIP    AS    ETHICAL  417 

proper  inference  is  that  the  essential  and  noiimenal 
divinity  of  Christ  the  Son  ought  to  be  formulated  in 
conceptions  other  than  substance  or  nature  and  the  like, 
which  really  oppose  the  metaphysical  aspect  of  Sonship 
to  the  ethical.  Theology  has  been  seriously  discredited 
in  the  past  by  neglect  of  the  truth  that  our  Lord's  Son- 
ship,  whatever  more,  is  ethical  through  and  through, 
and  that  unless  we  could  fill  uj)  the  idea  of  Sonship 
with  the  love,  trust,  and  obedience  which  make  life  filial, 
it  would  mean  nothing  for  our  minds.  From  these  mis- 
understandings, however,  we  are  slowly  being  freed. 
Perhaps  the  modern  danger  is  that  in  our  new-found  joy 
in  the  ethical,  we  should  forget  that  the  ethical  is  also  the 
metaphysical,  that  it  represents  the  key  to  being  as  such. 
The  ultimate  and  central  reality  of  things  is  Will.  Now 
the  will  of  Christ  as  Son  is  one  with  God's  will  not 
partially,  or  intermittently,  or  by  way  of  metaphor ;  it  is 
one  identically.  No  doubt  we  speak  loosely  of  making 
our  wills  one  with  God's ;  but  although  our  wills  may  be 
harmonious  with  God's  will,  or  obedient  to  it,  or  (so  to 
speak)  parallel  with  it,  they  are  never  really  one  with  it. 
Yet  such  real  unity  is  precisely  what  we  predicate  of 
Christ ;  the  self-conscious  active  principle  of  the  Son's 
life  subsisted  in  perfect  and  identical  union  with  the 
Father.  This  of  course  does  not  carry  us  once  more 
beyond  the  moral  relations  of  love  and  trust ;  that  were  to 
de-ethicise  Sonship  all  over  again.  What  is  meant  is 
that  these  relations  must  be  interpreted  at  their  full 
value — as  significant  of  truth  proper,  not  mere  metaphors 
— and  when  we  take  them  so,  it  appears  that  essentially 
(which  means  not  in  virtue  of  some  ineffable  substance, 
but  in  that  central  Will  by  which  personality  is  con- 
stituted) Christ  is  one  with  God.  The  name  Son,  there- 
fore, signifies  two  things :  first,  Christ's  true  subordination 
to  the  Father ;  secondly,  His  inherent  and  personal  unity 
with  the  Father.  The  Divine  intimacies  of  His  relation 
to  the  Eternal  are  only  interpretable  in  terms  which 
exhibit  Him  not  merely  as  the  perfect  saint,  but  as 
27 


418  THE    PERSON    OF   JESUS    CHRIST 

One   whose    life    is    definitively   centred    within    the    life 
of  God. 

(c)  The   risen    Life.     As    an    additional    third    point, 
this  is  strictly  relative  to  the  former    two.     Jesus'  utter 
sinlessness,  His   unique    Sonship,  and  finally  His  exalted 
life  constitute  a  chain   of    facts  not    properly  intelligible 
apart  from    His    personal    divinity.      They  are    mutually 
illuminative    facts.      The    resurrection  was   not    the   only 
event  which  revealed  Christ's  greatness,  but  it  did  reveal 
it.     By  it  He  was  -declared  Son  of  God  with  power,  and 
its   significance,  for  the   first  witnesses,  was   due    to   the 
fact  that  it  arrived  as   the  climax  and  interpretation  of 
the  incomparable  life  by  which  it  was  preceded.     Jesus' 
freedom   from  all  sin   and  His  unprecedented  experience 
of  filial  communion  had  stirred  deep  questionings  which 
the    resurrection    answered.      Hitherto    the    disciples  had 
perceived   the   transcendent  quality  of  His  being  only  by 
faintest  intuition ;  now  at  length  all  things  fell  into  place 
as  His    inherent  oneness  with   God   was    realised.     They 
beheld  Him  thenceforward  in  "  glory " — entered,  that  is, 
on   a  career  of    redeeming    efficacy  which    embraces    the 
whole  world  and    pervades    the    secret    chambers  of    the 
soul.     That  faith  we  share ;  their  argument,  accordingly, 
we  repeat  (though   it   may  be  in   other  forms),  that  this 
exaltation  to  the  exercise  of  an  omnipotent  and  universal 
love  indicates  a  more  than  creaturely  being  which  needs 
for  its  true  and  precise  explication  the  categories  of  the 
Divine.       Obviously    this    argument   would    be    worthless 
if,    for    Jesus,     resurrection     were     no     more     than     re- 
animation.       But     the    resurrection    of     Jesus    is    really 
differentiated  from  all  imaginable  parallels  by  its  sequel, 
by  all  to  which  it  formed  the  porch  and  gateway.     The 
sovereign   power  of  His  risen   life   is  something  in  which 
ex  hypothcsi  He  can  have  no  successor.      Thus  the  trans- 
cendent activities   briefly  described   in   the  word  "  exalta- 
tion "  not  only  point  in  the  same  direction  as  Jesus'  sin- 
lessness and  special  Sonship  ;   it  is  harmonious  with   them : 
there  is  an  interior   correlation   between  the   perfect  filial 


IS    GODHEAD   THP]    RIGHT    WORD  ?  419 

life  and  the  universal  glory  in  wliich  at  last  it  merged. 
In  each  case  an  unshared  experience  proclaims  an  unshared 
identity  with  the  Divine.  It  is  part  then  of  the  final  truth 
of  things  that  only  He  to  whom  belongs  the  free  inde- 
pendence of  the  Infinite  over  against  the  finite  can  fill 
the  place  in  which  Christian  faith  now  beholds  its  Lord. 

And  yet  the  question  may  be  asked,  asked  by  faith  not 
unbelief,  whether  "  Godhead  "  is  the  perfectly  right  word. 
Haering's  expositions  of  the  Christian  view  of  Jesus  is  so 
admirably  clear  and  loyal  that  a  peculiar  interest  attaches 
to  his  suggestion  of  a  doubt.^  Not  that  he  questions  the 
historic  claims  of  the  word  "  Godhead."  To  think  of 
Christ  as  of  God  has,  he  points  out,  been  the  hall-mark 
of  Christian  life  and  Christian  theology  throughout  the 
centuries,  except  in  Eationalistic  circles  of  the  eighteenth 
century.  Further,  althougli  the  designation  of  Christ  as 
"  God "  seldom  occurs  in  the  writings  of  the  New  Testa- 
ment, as  fair  exegesis  will  admit,  yet  to  infer  that  the 
early  Church  felt  the  designation  a  too  lofty  one  would 
be  erroneous.  Various  other  expressions  are  equivalent. 
Christ  is  bracketed  with  God  the  Father;  titles  reserved 
for  Jehovah  in  the  Old  Testament  are  ascribed  to  Him 
with  unembarrassed  simplicity.  What  the  Christians 
meant,  indeed,  is  shown  by  the  impression  made  on  the 
non-Christian  world,  which  had  not  the  least  objection 
to  a  new  additional  deity  being  included  in  the  pantheon, 
but  instantly  recognised  that  to  worship  Jesus  Christ 
was  a  wholly  different  matter,  implying  as  it  did  a  revolu- 
tionising change  in  moral  attitude.  It  is  not  going  too 
far  to  say  that  the  Church,  aware  of  the  loose  usage  of 
"  God  "  in  heathen  quarters,  must  have  been  peculiarly 
sensitive  to  the  perils  of  misconception  within  the 
Christian  community  itself,  and  must  therefore  have  been 
at  especial  pains  to  ensure  that  the  term  was  attributed 

^  Dogmatik,  425-26.  Cf.  also  a  deeply  interesting  passage  in  Harnack, 
Ails  Wissenschaft  und  Lebcn,  ii.  70-71,  where  it  is  suggested  that  "God- 
manhood  "  alone  is  the  correct  term. 


420  THE    PERSON    OF   JESUS    CHRIST 

to  Jesus'  person  with  a  quite  new  significance.  Haering 
inclines  on  this  ground  to  beheve  that  the  infrequency 
of  the  word  in  the  New  Testament  is  due  really  to  its 
defect  in  clarity,  its  liability  to  misconstruction,  and  the 
fatal  ease  with  which  it  could  be  made  to  yield  the  poly- 
theistic suggestion  of  "  a  second  God."  Pursuing  this  line, 
he  contends  that  everything  faith  longs  to  say  about 
Christ  can  be  said,  adequately  and  lucidly,  without  em- 
ploying the  term  "  Godhead,"  e.g.  by  the  phrases  Son  of 
God,  Lord,  or  simply  Jesus  Christ.  All  believers  are 
united  in  the  confession  of  Jesus  Christ ;  but  under  the 
conditions  in  which  we  moderns  live  the  assertion  of  His 
"  Godhead  "  is  certain  to  divide.  It  will  prove  a  burden 
and  perplexity  to  many  who  nevertheless  adore  Jesus  as 
their  Lord  and  Saviour. 

A  second  typical  statement  on  the  same  side  is  that  of 
Faut.^  Granting  the  absolute  character  of  the  redemption 
which  Jesus  mediates  and  in  consequence  the  absolute 
character  of  the  Mediator's  person,  he  yet  holds  that  the 
difficulties  of  predicating  real  deity  are  insurmountable. 
He  insists  that  Godhead  was  first  ascribed  to  the  exalted 
Lord.  But  if  we  go  so  far,  in  logic  we  must  go  still 
further  and  attribute  Godhead  also  to  Jesus  of  Nazareth — 
which  gives  us  pause.  It  is  unfitting  to  speak  of  the 
historic  Christ  as  God,  medium  of  the  final  revelation 
though  He  be.  For  it  blurs  the  interpretation  of  His 
earthly  life ;  also  it  conflicts  gravely  with  Jesus'  mono- 
theism. The  one  thing  we  dare  not  do  is  to  create  anta- 
gonism between  faith  in  Jesus  and  His  own  creed.  It 
is  simply  unevangelical  to  dim  the  clear  shining  of  the 
Gospel  by  dogmatic  assertions  which  collide  with  trust 
in  one  only  God,  the  Father  Almighty. 

In  reply,  it  is  to  be  observed  in  the  first  place  that  the 
presence  of  difficulties  cannot  be  final  as  an  objection  to 
a  given  view.  On  any  view  the  difficulties  are  immense, 
the  facts  are  full  of  them.  Excessive  simplification  of 
the  data  is  often  the  bane  of  scientific  inquiry ;  and  in  the 

^  Die  Christologie  seit  Schleiermacher,  97-98. 


IS   GODHEAD    THE    RIGHT    WORD?  421 

present  instance  the  data  may  be  so  complex  or  many-sided 
that — provided  we  have  made  up  our  mind  to  interpret 
them  doctrinally — nothing  but  a  complex  interpretation 
will  serve.  It  is  also  questionable  whether  the  feeling 
that  Godhead  is  an  unfitting  predicate,  as  blurring  the 
outline  of  the  human  Jesus,  may  not  be  due  to  the  abstract- 
ness  of  the  conception,  and  a  too  purely  logical  view  of  the 
attributes  it  implies.  Of  course  the  notion  of  deity  may 
be  construed  in  ways  wliich  render  Christ's  true  manhood 
indistinct  or  actually  dubious ;  but  these  ways  are  wrong. 
Thus,  confusing,  as  logicians  say,  the  dictum  simpliciter 
with  the  dictum  secundum  quid,  we  may  aigue  that  since 
Godhead  as  such  is  omniscient  and  omnipresent,  the 
Divine  Christ  must  have  been  so ;  whereas  the  question 
can  only  be  decided  by  the  recorded  evidence  of  the 
Gospels,  from  which  alone  we  can  learn  what  Godhead 
signifies  in  an  Incarnate  experience.  Or  again,  placing 
the  reality  of  God  not  in  His  will  and  character  but  in 
an  inscrutable  and  unethical  substance,  we  may  conclude 
that  deity  could  be  present  in  Christ  only  by  being  laid 
alongside  of  His  manhood,  not  in  qualitative  identity  but  in 
quantitative  juxtaposition ;  and  this  also  will  prevent  our 
seeing  the  individual  Jesus  as  intelligibly  Divine.  It  will 
mislead  us,  m  Moberly's  phrase,  into  keeping  open  a  non- 
human  sphere  of  the  Incarnation.  It  was  precisely  the 
wish  to  read  the  divinity  of  Christ  through  His  true 
humanity  which  inspired  the  Kenotic  theories  of  His 
person  ;  and  whatever  may  be  thought  of  certain  speculative 
details  in  which  they  became  entangled,  it  is  still  con- 
ceivable that  the  principle  they  represent,  not  necessarily 
in  the  older  form,  may  succeed  in  mitigating  the  diffi- 
culties of  the  problem. 

Even  if  difficulties  remain,  still  the  facts  which  the  name 
"  God  "  indicates  may  be  so  organic  to  Christian  experience 
as  to  force  us,  even  against  our  will,  to  insist  upon  its 
truth.  We  may  not  be  able  (as  it  were)  to  get  our  hand 
round  the  reality  to  wliich  it  points,  but  we  perceive  or 
feel  its  presence.     For  after  all,  Christianity  lives  not  in  a 


422  THE    PERSON    OF    JESUS    CHRIST 

vacuum  but  in  the  world  of  real  men.  It  is  preached  to 
keen  and  independent  minds,  who  ask  questions  they  wish 
to  be  answered.  Is  it  possible  to  proclaim  Christ  in  such 
an  audience  as  Lord  of  all,  who  shares  the  throne  of  God, 
on  whom  faith  and  love  and  hope  depend,  the  transcendent 
source  of  new  life,  the  unseen  Presence  that  arraigns  the 
conscience  and  sustains  the  fainting  heart,  without  evoking 
the  simple  interpellation :  This  Christ  of  whom  you  speak, 
is  He,  or  is  He  not,  one  with  the  Ultimate  Eeality  whom 
we  name  God  ?  If  Christianity  is  a  religion,  not  a  con- 
tribution to  moral  philosophy,  where  do  we  place  Him  in 
the  sphere  of  things,  on  God's  side,  or  merely  on  ours  ? 
When  once  these  questions  rise,  they  cannot  long  be 
evaded ;  no  well-intentioned  conspiracy  of  silence,  no 
combination  of  ultra-cautious  propositions,  will  avail  to 
suppress  the  interrogator  whose  Christology  in  reality  is 
part  of  his  spiritual  life.  Had  the  Church  passed  by  the 
question  in  the  creeds,  the  outsider  would  have  raised  it. 
We  have  seen  that  writers  like  Haering  are  themselves 
clear  that  to  speak  of  Christ's  "  Godhead  "  is  justifiable  if 
we  thereby  mean  simply  to  express  an  authentically  religious 
faith ;  and  certainly  we  mean  no  more.  It  is  only  as  a 
brief  statement  of  the  Gospel  that  the  term  has  any  value. 
But  what  is  here  contended  is  that  the  Gospel  cannot  be 
expressed  completely  apart  from  this  word,  because  the 
word  "  God  "  has  no  synonyms.  What  the  believer  wishes 
to  assert  is  not  that  Christ  is  manifestly  superhuman  and 
so  far  partially  Divine,  but  that  His  will,  the  personal 
energy  which  moved  in  Him,  is  identically  the  will  of  God. 
Now  that,  in  the  last  resort,  can  only  be  affirmed  in  one 
way.  "  In  the  work  Christ  does  upon  us,"  writes  Herr- 
mann, "  we  get  a  view  of  His  Person  which  can  only  be 
rightly  indicated  in  the  confession  of  His  Deity."  ^  Give 
faith  its  own  way,  not  curbing  or  tutoring  or  sophisticating 
it,  and  this  is  the  predicate  for  which  it  asks. 

If  it  be  said  that  deity,  though  possibly  implied  in  the 
believing  view  of   Christ,  is  at  all  events  not  necessarily 
^  Communion  with  God,  142. 


ACQUIRED    DIVINITY  423 

a  conscions  implication,  tiiis  may  be  readily  conceded.  At 
the  same  time,  it  is  the  very  business  of  theology  to  bring 
faith's  content  to  complete  consciousness,  and  to  articulate 
in  explicit  and  coherent  terms  what  may  lie  enfolded  in 
unreflective  experience.  So  by  a  wide  circuit  we  return 
to  our  starting-point ;  to  the  conviction,  namely,  that  Chris- 
tology  as  such  is  meaningless  save  on  the  presupposition 
of  Christ's  Godhead,  while  on  the  other  hand  His  Godhead 
is  no  random  or  arbitrary  postulate,  but  the  reverse  side 
of  the  assurance  that  He  is  the  proper  object  of  saving 
faith.  "  Worship  God  through  Christ,  and  Christ  only  as 
God,"  is  an  axiom  inviolable  and  sacrosanct. 

Is  there  the  promise  of  light  in  the  suggestion  that 
Christ's  Godhead,  though  real,  has  been  acquired  ?  The 
idea  sounds  mythological,  certainly ;  yet  it  is  not  wholly 
without  advocates  in  recent  literature.  Thus,  in  his  well- 
known  book  on  the  Gottlieit  Christi,  Schultz  can  speak 
of  Jesus  at  one  point  as  a  man  "  who  became  God  in  be- 
coming the  Christ."  ^  Beyschlag  has  put  forward  a  similar 
view.  A  few  Eitschlians  also  may  possibly  have  covered 
an  opinion  rather  like  this  with  the  phrase  that  Christ  has 
for  us  the  religious  value  of  God — in  forgetfuluess  of  the 
maxim  that  iisus  sine  re  est  figmentum.  Now  to  find  in 
the  New  Testament  the  conception  of  a  deity  which  became, 
is  simply  a  forlorn  hope ;  since  the  Jewish  mind  was  by 
its  very  constitution  incapable  of  applying  to  God  the 
category  of  creation.^  It  belongs  to  deity,  not  indeed  to 
be  immutable  but  to  be  eternal — not  born  out  of  nothing 
or  moving  from  zero  to  an  actual  positive  magnitude.  So 
faith  views  Jesus  not  merely  as  One  who  through  grace 
rose  to  a  union  with  the  Highest  comparable  to  that 
achieved  by  saints,  though  far  more  intimate,  but  as  One 
whose  development  in  Divine-human  personality  took  place 

» 725-26. 

*  I  cannot  follow  Titius  in  his  jilea  tliat  the  name  "God  "  is  employed  in 
the  New  Testiiment  with  a  certain  Hnidity  and  indecision  wliich  wculd 
admit  of  its  being  seriously  ajiplied  to  a  cieature.  He  cites  1  Co  8'', 
2  Co  4^  Jn  lO-'^f-  {Theologischc  Lirndschau,  1905,  p.  365). 


424  THE   PERSON    OF   JESUS    CHRIST 

within  His  own  native  sphere  of  transcendence.  Eeal 
gains  there  were  which  accrued  from  His  ethically 
conditioned  triumph — a  new,  universal  place  in  the  faith 
and  adoration  of  mankind  ;  but  the  quality  of  being  which 
made  this  place  befitting,  and  which  empowered  Him  for 
its  functions,  reveals  itself  as  no  creation  of  time  but  an 
eternal  fact.  Further,  on  the  hypothesis  according  to 
which  the  Godhead  of  Christ  represents  an  extraneous 
acquisition,  we  surrender  the  vast  New  Testament  con- 
viction (implying  a  new  thought  of  God)  that  the  first 
step  into  the  human  sphere  taken  by  God  in  Christ  was 
one  of  self-abnegation.  Love,  the  spirit  which  gives  its 
own  life  to  others,  is  the  inmost  reality  of  Christ  and 
of  God,  and  it  was  manifested  transcendently  in  His 
historical  advent.  It  was  because  deity  was  His  from 
before  all  time  that  He  possessed  the  unspeakable  gift  to 
lay  on  love's  altar.  On  the  other  hand,  the  conception  of 
an  acquired  divinity  stands  on  a  lower  ethical  plane;  it 
has  parted  with  the  aspect  of  sublimity.^ 

Thus  a  point  emerges  which  in  such  debates  it  is 
only  too  easy  to  ignore — the  commanding  place  of  the 
incarnation  in  the  Christian  message.  If  the  Church's 
mind  is  to  retain  a  luminous  and  defensible  faith  in  our 
Lord's  divinity,  that  faith  must  present  itself  as  so 
wonderful  in  intensity  and  range,  in  triumphant  redeeming 
power,  as  to  admit  of  no  rival  or  surrogate.  Let  men 
perceive  that  in  Christ  there  stands  before  them  One  who 
in  spiritual  being — that  is,  in  will  and  character — is 
identical  with  God  Himself,  that  in  Him  we  have  to  do 
with  nothing  less  than  the  Eternal,  and  at  once  it  becomes 
plain  that  revelation  can  go  no  further.  In  other  words, 
the    dimensions    of    this    revelation    form    the   differential 

^  Thieme  lias  recently  contended  that  we  should  drop  the  adjectives 
"Divine"  and  even  "  Divine-hnman,"  and  proposes  instead  that  Jesus 
should  be  characterised  as  "  the  Human  Representative  of  God  in  ruling  the 
world"  {Fonder  Gotlheit  Christi,  65).  Does  this  make  things  easier? 
Curiously,  it  is  the  revival  of  an  old  Judaistic  conception  of  the  Messiah 
(Renan,  Vie  de  Jesus,  258). 


THE   GOSPEL    OF    INCARNATION  425 

feature  of  ChiisLiaiiity.  It  is  not  that  Jesus  Christ,  even 
if  viewed  as  a  historic  personality  with  such  a  limited  and 
derived  resemblance  to  God  as  is  possible  to  other  men, 
may  not  convey  a  real  manifestation  of  the  Father — His 
judgment  and  His  mercy,  His  irreconcilable  antagonism 
to  sin,  His  unwearied  passion  to  reach  and  win  the  sinful, 
"  In  what  Jesus  does  to  us,"  says  Herrmann,  "  we  grasp  the 
expression  God  gives  us  of  His  feeling  towards  us,  or  God 
Himself  as  a  Personal  Spirit  working  upon  us.  This  is 
the  form  in  which  every  man  who  has  been  reconciled 
to  God  through  Christ  necessarily  confesses  His  Deity, 
even  although  he  may  decline  to  adopt  the  formula." ' 
Now  by  "  declining  the  formula "  is  meant  occasionally 
that  the  restricted  and  humanitarian  Christ  is  sufficient 
for  human  need,  and  to  this  the  answer  is  simply  that  we 
can  conceive  a  far  more  glorious  Gospel.  We  can  conceive 
the  thought  that  God  Himself  should  be  present  to  heal 
and  save.  And  we  judge  that  the  most  glorious  thought 
of  God,  always,  is  truest.  Love  in  essence  is  desire  and 
will  to  suffer  for  the  sake  of  the  beloved  :  to  enter  his 
condition,  to  take  his  load,  to  renounce  every  privilege. 
Not  to  send  a  sympathetic  message  simply,  or  appear  by 
deputy,  but  to  come  in  person,  obstacles  and  counter- 
reasons  notwithstanding.  Otherwise  love  is  not  known  as 
love.  Even  of  God  it  is  true  that  he  who  would  save  his 
life  must  lose  it.^ 

Humanity  in  every  age  has  put  its  final  misgiving  into 
the  question  whether  God,  if  there  be  a  God,  is  near  to 
us  actively  in  love.  It  is  a  question  audible  in  the  deeper 
undertones  of  the  world's  literature  as  well  as  in  those 
desperate  experiments  of  supplication  of  which  the  lower 
religions  are  full.  Only  in  the  message  of  Christ's  identity 
with  God  does  it  obtain  an  answer.  Certainly  we  are 
not  justified  in  using  such  ideas  in  cl  priori  modes,  so 
dictating  beforehand  how  a  Eedeemer  must  be  fashioned. 
Yet  if   our  thought  has  been  educated  and  expanded  by 

'  Communion  icith  God,  143. 

*  Cf.  Macgiegor,  Jesus  Christ  the  Son  of  God,  198  ff. 


426  THE    PERSON    OF   JESUS    CHRIST 

our  discoveries  in  Jesus  we  shall  have  courage  to  believe 
that  the  Love  manifest  in  Him  would  shrink  from  no 
moral  possibility  essential  to  the  accomplishment  of  its 
aim.  This,  so  far  from  being  a  romantic  modern  notion, 
was  from  the  very  outset  the  living  core  of  apostolic 
preaching.  The  discovery  of  Jesus'  real  identity  had 
created  a  quite  new  conception  of  Divine  grace.  "  Herein 
is  love,"  wiites  St.  John, "  not  that  we  loved  God,  but  that 
He  loved  us,  and  sent  His  Son."  And  the  message  broke 
the  world's  hard  heart.  Our  former  insistence  on  Christ's 
true  manhood  is  in  no  sense  incongruous  with  this,  much 
less  its  refutation  ;  for  the  acceptance  of  the  authentic 
human  experience  seals  the  eternal  love  as  infinite.  Thus 
it  is  religion,  not  theology,  which  has  the  deepest  stake 
in  the  divinity  of  Christ.  Let  men  be  persuaded  that  it 
is  after  all  a  metaphor  only,  an  over-wrought  symbol,  the 
adoring  hyperbole  of  which  must  be  quietly  confessed  in 
the  sane  mood  of  reflection,  and  the  high  appeal  which  has 
so  long  moved  them  will  be  impoverislied  past  remedy. 
The  glory  of  God's  love  will  fade  into  dimmer  hues. 
There  will  remain  problems  no  word  but  this  can  solve, 
and  needs  which  no  lesser  gift  can  satisfy. 


PART  III. 

THE  TRANSCENDENT  IMPLICATES 
OF  FAITH. 


CHAPTER   VIII. 

THE  CHRISTIAN  IDEA  OF  INCARNATION. 

At  an  earlier  point,  in  a  brief  forecast  of  the  argument, 
we  proposed  to  deal  first  with  the  immediate  utterances  of 
faith  regarding  Christ,  in  the  second  place  with  such 
remoter  implicates  or  presuppositions  as  faith  may  involve. 
The  first  part  of  our  task  now  lies  behind  us.  We  have 
souglit  to  analyse  and  vindicate  the  instinctive  or  naive 
content  of  faith.  It  has  been  made  clear  that  for  the 
believing  consciousness  Christ  has  a  central  and  incom- 
municable place  in  the  religious  sphere,  that  He  reigns 
for  ever  in  the  sovereign  glory  of  His  resurrection,  that 
He  is  perfect  Man,  and  that  He  is  inherently  Divine.  Of 
these  positions  the  Church  is  well  assured;  when  it  looks 
into  its  own  mind,  it  finds  them  there. 

We  now  turn  to  consider  the  transcendent  problems 
which  the  person  of  our  Lord,  thus  believed  in,  offers  to 
intelligence  in  its  work  of  constructive  synthesis  and  inter- 

LiTERATURE — Illiiigworth,  Divine  Immanence,  1903;  Reischle,  Theologie 
und  Beliffionsg-:schichfe,  1904;  Troeltsch,  Die  AhsohUheit  des  Christentums 
und  die  Eeligionsgeachichte,  1902  ;  Fairbairn,  Philosojihy  of  the  Christian 
Religion,  1903  ;  Walker,  The  Spirit  and  the  Incarnation,  1901  ;  D'Arcy, 
Idfahsm  and  Theology,  1899  ;  Caird,  Fundamental  Ideas  of  Christianity, 
1899  ;  Doraer,  System  of  Christian  Doctrine,  1890  ;  Biedermann,  Christliclie 
Dogmatik,  1869  ;  Gess,  Christi  Person  und  Werk,  1870-87. 

427 


428  THE    PERSON    OF   JESUS    CHRIST 

pretation.^  Mysteries  of  faith  can  never  be  secluded  from 
the  activities  of  reason ;  for  the  mind  must  strive  to 
discover  its  own  unity  even  in  its  supreme  object.  If 
Christianity  proclaims  Jesus  as  the  keystone  of  the  arch 
of  history,  the  redeeming  presence  of  God  in  time,  it  must 
not  shrink  from  the  attempt  to  think  out  and  think 
through  the  implied  questions  as  to  His  ultimate  relation 
to  God  and  man,  and  the  union  of  Godhead  and  mauliood 
in  His  person.  Among  these  questions  one  of  the  fore- 
most and  most  baffling  is  the  idea  of  incarnation.  By 
asserting  the  divinity  of  Christ  we  have  bound  ourselves 
to  the  doctrine  that  He  is  in  some  real  sense  God  incarnate, 
and  we  must  now  inquire  as  to  the  general  significance 
and  credibility  of  this  conception. 

It  has  often  been  suggested  that  incarnation  in  the 
case  of  Christ  is  rendered  improbable  by  the  fact  that 
allied  beliefs  occur  in  various  ethnic  religions.  The  con- 
viction that  deity  may  take  embodied  form  in  this  or  that 
great  man  was  widely  spread,  for  example,  in  Greece  and 
India.  Out  of  this  ineradicable  mental  tendency  have 
sprung  a  multitude  of  myths  resembling  the  Christian 
story.  And  this,  it  is  held,  discredits  our  doctrine  from 
the  first.  Jesus  was  deemed  to  be  God  incarnate  only 
because  in  that  age  the  thought-form  of  incarnation  was 
commonly  applied  to  impressive  personalities.  Men  stood 
ready  with  the  conception,  and  no  grave  sense  of  intel- 
lectual difficulty  restrained  their  use  of  it. 

But  it  may  be  pointed  out  that  in  a  moral  world  it  is 
no  argument  against  the  reality  of  a  particular  event  that 
its  occurrence  was  expected.  To  those  who  believe  in  a 
loving  God  it  must  always  appear  antecedently  credible 
that  He  will  make  answer  in  person  to  the  religious 
yearnings,  the  mysterious  hopes,  the  infinite  premonitory 

^  Tliey  are  real  problems,  and  theology  will  always  strive  to  solve  them 
by  reasoned  thought,  but  we  are  much  more  sure  of  our  facts  than  of  our 
theories.  While  the  fact  of  Christ's  oneness  with  God  is  certain  for  faith, 
interpretations  of  this  oneness  will  vary  to  the  end.  But  every  form  of 
interpretation  presupposes  the  initial  impression  of  His  transcendence. 


PAGAN    THEOPHANIES  429 

gleams  with  whicli  devout  minds  have  been  filled.  These 
considerations  do  not  entitle  us  to  disparage  concrete 
evidence.  But  if  in  the  record  of  the  past  we  encounter 
One  whose  self-cons^ciousness  was  undeniably  unique,  and 
who  has  been  able  to  communicate  to  men  a  new  Divine 
life,  we  need  not  refrain  from  acknowledging  Him  as  God 
manifest  in  the  flesh  merely  on  the  ground  that  there  have 
been  many  "  pagan  Christs."  The  wants  and  longings 
which  led  men  to  worship  these  redeemers  of  heathenism 
were  inspired  of  God,  and  into  the  empty  pathetic  hands 
thus  stretched  to  the  skies  He  was  in  due  time  to  put  the 
perfect  fulfilment  of  the  world's  desire.  Such  experiences 
formed  the  preparatio  evangcUca  of  ethnic  man.  They 
constitute  no  proof  that  a  real  incarnation  did  not  come  at 
last ;  at  least  they  do  so  only  if  we  illegitimately  assume 
that  incarnation  is  per  se  impossible.  Indeed  they 
corroborate  our  faith,  for  it  is  in  keeping  with  what  we 
know  of  the  Divine  providential  action  that  the  final 
redemption  should  not  have  been  given  abruptly,  but  in 
relation  to  a  rudimentary  apparatus  of  ideas  by  which  it 
might  be  apprehended.  As  it  has  been  admirably  put : 
"  If  we  are  so  made  that  a  Son  of  God  must  deliver  us,  is 
it  odd  that  Patagonians  (and  others)  should  dream  of  a 
Son  of  God."  ^  These  immemorial  premonitions  were  not 
the  cause  of  the  Gospel,  but  they  enabled  men  to 
appreciate  it  when  it  came. 

Furthermore,  it  may  be  taken  as  certain  that  the  first 
believers  did  not  borrow  their  greatest  thoughts  of  Christ. 
The  source  of  their  vocabulary — of  such  terms  as  "  Lord  " 
and  "  Eedeemer  " — is  comparatively  unimportant ;  in  any 
case,  older  associations  could  not  have  dictated  the 
apostolic  use  of  words.  Echoes  of  pagan  terminology  may 
doubtless  occur  in  the  New  Testament,  since  there  is  no 
copyright  in  phrases ;  but  the  resemblance  is  in  expression 
only,  not  in  meaning.  "We  must  not  be  imposed  upon  by 
what  is  but  a  specious  verbal  coincidence.  Current  ideas 
of  incarnation  or  apotheosis,  far  from  impressing  men  of 
'  Chesterton,  Religious  Doubts  of  Democracy,  18. 


430  THE    PERSON    OF   JESUS    CHRIST 

St.  Paul's  stamp,  were  dismissed  as  abhorreutly  blasphe- 
mous. No  pagan  tales  of  theophany  cau  have  helped  out 
a  Jewish  apostle  with  his  Christology,  whatever  may  have 
been  the  case  with  his  Gentile  hearers.  It  was  his  unique 
experience  of  Christ,  not  the  common  habit  of  naming  the 
Emperor  "  Son  of  God,"  that  led  St.  Paul  up  to  the  loftiest 
summits  of  doctrine.  He  felt  that  in  Jesus  the  Lord  there 
had  been  given  him  One  of  whom  other  "  lords "  were 
false  and  usurping  shadows. 

And  yet  again,  the  Christian  idea  of  incarnation  is 
sharply  differentiated  from  all  others  by  its  purely  ethical 
quality.  To  the  most  cursory  reader  of  the  Greek  myths, 
on  the  other  hand,  it  is  plain  that  the  Divine  life  is 
conceived  as  moving  on  the  lines  of  the  physical  world. 
To  quote  Sir  W.  M.  Ramsay  :  "  The  Divine  nature,  which  is 
the  model  and  prototype  of  all  the  activity  of  man,  was 
seen  liviog  and  dying  in  the  life  of  trees  and  plants,  of 
grass  and  corn.  .  .  .  The  life  of  nature  never  ends ;  it 
dies  only  to  be  born,  different  and  yet  the  same.  Men 
mourn  for  the  dead  god,  and  immediately  their  mourning 
is  turned  into  joy,  for  the  god  is  reborn."  ^  The  funda- 
mental conception  of  deity  is  imperfectly  moralised. 
Apollo  could  be  pictured  as  the  son  of  a  wolf-mother. 
The  avataras  of  the  god  Vishnu,  as  narrated  in  Hindu 
legend,  betray  in  a  variety  of  features  the  lowering 
influence  of  a  strongly  pantheistic  view  of  the  world. 
The  Hindu  mind  is  also  lacking  in  a  sense  for  history ; 
and  when  we  meet  with  the  idea  of  incarnation  in  "  the 
encyclopaedic  aggregation  of  cults  and  customs  we  know  as 
Hinduism,"  we  must  carefully  guard  ourselves  against 
supposing  that  supreme  significance  is  thereby  attributed 
to  some  real  personality,  with  a  distinct  place  in  the  time- 
series.  The  single  fact  that  for  Hinduism  history  belongs 
to  the  realm  of  the  illusory,  while  for  Greek  thought  its 
reality,  in  comparison  with  the  unchanging  forms  of  being, 
is  at  most  second-rate,  is  enough  to  prove  how  far  in  each 
case  the  underlying  philosophy  differs  from  the  Christian. 
1  Hastings'  DB.  (Extra  Volume),  123-24. 


PAGAN    THEOPHANIES  431 

It  is  significant  that  both  in  Greek  and  Indian  myth  the 
notion  of  a  god  becoming  man  appears  in  the  most  varied 
circumstances  and  with  the  most  diverse  colours.  The 
metamorphosis  takes  place  often,  in  many  ages  and  many 
lands.  Incarnation  and  apotheosis  melt  into  each  other ; 
for  if  the  conception  of  Godhead  is  such  that  a  whole 
pantheon  can  be  formed  by  the  successive  promotion  of 
princes  and  heroes,  a  plurality  of  Divine  advents  may  be 
easily  conceded. 

In  Christianity,  on  the  other  hand,  the  idea  of 
incarnation,  controlled  as  it  is  by  a  perfectly  ethical 
idea  of  God,  is  once  for  all  lifted  to  a  higher  plane.  It 
is  ethically  conditioned,  sustained  by  ethical  motives, 
directed  to  an  ethical  goal  or  final  end.  Jesus  comes  to 
achieve  a  spiritual  redemption,  in  modes  appealing  to  mind 
and  conscience ;  and  the  qualities  which  bring  men  to 
recognise  Him  are  love,  holiness,  and  redeeming  power. 
Only  those  who  owe  Him  salvation  can  realise  His  higher 
nature,  and  it  is  moral  regeneration  which  gives  the  vision 
of  His  glory.  This  is  frequently  ignored  even  in  modern 
statements,  which  confuse  the  ethical  quality  of  Christ 
with  what  is  physical  or  natural  in  man  as  such,  and, 
misled  by  the  erroneous  premise,  talk  loosely  of  the  Christ 
in  every  man.  But  for  all  religion  controlled  by  the  New 
Testament  our  Lord  is  not  merely  an  incarnation  of  God, 
as  others  may  be  in  their  own  place  ;  He  is  the  unique  and 
essential  appearance  of  God  in  history.  No  duplication  is 
conceivable.  Thus  whatever  dim  foreshadowings  of  truth 
may  have  visited  the  ethnic  mind,  they  fail  utterly  to 
explain  the  full  and  spiritual  Christian  faith.  They  are 
shifting  expressions  of  man's  thought  of  God,  not  God's 
self-expression  to  man. 

No  conception  has  seized  the  modern  mind  more 
powerfully  than  that  of  Divine  immanence,  and  we  must 
now  inquire  how  it  is  related  to  the  higher  thought  of 
incarnation  ?  Let  us  first  clear  up  our  minds  as  to  the 
kind  of  immanence  Christian  men  are  free  to  assert     It 


432  THE    PERSON    OF   JESUS    CHRIST 

must  be  in  harmouy  with  that  ethical  monotheism  which 
the  Old  Testament  transmitted  to  the  New.  Immanence 
as  expounded,  for  example,  by  Spinoza,  who,  though  no 
materialist,  yet  declares  that  God  is  a  being  neither  mind 
nor  matter,  but  revealing  Himself  in  both,  and  not  appar- 
ently more  in  one  than  in  the  other,  has  always  failed  to 
meet  the  requirements  of  conscience.  Nor  will  any  view 
suffice  which — often  no  doubt  unconsciously — represents 
God  as  an  extremely  attenuated  kind  of  matter  diffused 
throughout  space.  It  is  also  necessary  that  we  should 
avoid  confusing  immanence  with  identity.  God  inhabits, 
pervades,  moves,  inspires  the  world  ;  in  this  sense  He  is 
immanent  as  the  soul  is  immanent  in  the  body,  with  a 
dynamic  ubiquity  involving  a  directly  active  relation  to 
each  part.  Yet  soul  and  body  are  not  identical,  nor  by 
analogy  is  God  identical  with  the  world.  In  order  that 
the  will  of  God  may  be  the  energy  of  the  universe,  it  must 
be  transcendent  to  that  which  it  indwells.  No  one  can  be 
so  keenly  aware  of  the  limits  of  the  Divine  immanence  as 
the  sinner,  to  whom  repentance  has  brought  home  the 
divergence  of  self  and  God  with  a  vivid  realisation  which 
is  sharpened  and  registered  by  the  sense  of  guilt.  In 
short,  we  cannot  operate  with  any  conception  of  immanence 
that  blots  out,  or  shows  indifference  to,  ethical  distinctions. 
But  this  all  views  eventually  do  which  have  been  formed 
on  the  analogy  of  space  in  relation  to  its  contents. 

Fidelity  to  moral  fact,  then,  obliges  us  to  emphasise,  as 
a  fundamental  principle,  the  truth  that  Divine  immanence 
is  essentially  a  matter  of  degree,  and  that  the  degrees  of  it 
are  morally  conditioned.  This  means  that  in  adjusting  the 
idea  of  incarnation  to  it  we  obtain  much  less  light  or  help 
than  might  have  been  supposed  from  the  conception  of 
Divine  immanence  in  nature — the  progressive  manifesta- 
tion of  God  in  matter,  as  it  has  been  called ;  primarily  for 
the  reason  that  matter  is  incapable  of  assimilating  or 
reflecting  the  characteristic  qualities  of  God,  holiness  and 
love.  It  must  always  be  for  us  an  opaque  and  inscrutable 
problem  how  the  impersonal,  the  unconscious  or   merely 


DEGREES    OF    IMMANENCE  433 

sentient,  can  be  the  organ  or  abode  of  Supreme  j\Iiud.  So 
inadequate  is  form  to  content  that  they  seem  for  ever 
incommensurable.  More  light  is  derivable  from  the  Divine 
indwelling  in  man,  as  revealed  by  the  voice  of  conscience. 
But  we  rise  still  higher  when  we  consider  the  inestimable 
privilege  of  Divine  sonship  conferred  on  all  those  who  are 
united  to  God  by  faith ;  for  in  them,  and  their  renovated 
being,  there  is  seen  a  free  realisation  by  man  of  the 
righteousness,  the  blessedness,  and  the  glory  of  the  Divine 
life.  Christian  experience  then  proves  the  reality  of 
union  with  God ;  only,  the  union  so  proved  is  no  mere 
nature-fact,  but  the  object  of  aspiration,  faith,  and  effort. 
Now  of  this  Divine  inhabitation  we  are  entitled  to  regard 
Christ  as  the  transcendent  climax,  shedding  the  light  of 
interpretation  on  each  preceding  stage.  All  that  can  be 
named  Divine  immanence  comes  to  itself  in  Him  and  is 
consummated,  for  in  Him  alone  there  exist  ethical  condi- 
tions which  make  form  and  content  equal  to  each  other. 
And  on  the  valid  principle  that  lower  modes  of  being  are 
explicable  by  the  higher,  it  is  clear  that  the  conception  of 
immanence  is  more  significant  and  luminous  if  we  start 
from  the  person  of  Christ,  and  the  absolute  presence  of 
God  in  Him,  than  if  our  point  of  departure  be  the  Divine 
permeation  of  the  universe  as  a  whole.  To  move  down 
from  God  in  Christ  is  more  convincing  than  to  move  up 
from  God  in  nature.  It  is  in  Jesus,  not  elsewhere,  that 
the  true  light  shines  by  which  we  may  read  the  wider 
problem.  Creation  finds  its  key  in  redemptive  incarnation. 
"  In  short,"  as  it  has  been  put,  "  there  is  no  problem  raised 
by  the  idea  of  God  manifest  in  the  flesh  as  to  the  relation 
of  the  Divine  nature  to  the  human  in  the  unity  of  one 
person,  or  as  to  the  historical  origin  of  such  a  relation,  i.e. 
its  beginning  in  time ;  or  as  to  the  action  of  the  limited 
manhood  on  the  illimitable  Godhood,  which  is  not  equally 
raised  by  the  inter-relations  of  God  and  nature.  For  in  a 
perfectly  real  sense  creation  is  incarnation ;  nature  is  the 
body  of  the  infinite  Spirit,  the  organism  which  the  Divine 
thought  has  articulated  and  filled  with  the  breath  of  life. 
28 


434  THE    PERSON    OF   JESUS    CHRIST 

But  while  the  problems  are  analogous,  the  factors  which 
promise  solution  are  more  potent  in  the  case  of  the  in- 
carnation than  of  creation.  For  in  nature  the  idea  of  God 
demands  for  its  expression  no  more  than  physical  and 
logical  categories,  but  in  Christ  the  categories  become 
rational,  ethical,  emotional,  i.e.  they  involve  personal 
qualities  and  relations  rather  than  mere  cosmical  modes 
and  energies.  And  so,  by  investing  God  with  a  higher 
degree  of  reality  and  higher  qualities  of  being,  it  makes  all 
His  attributes  and  relations  more  actual,  all  His  actions 
and  ways  more  intelligible  and  real."  ^ 

One  true  mode  of  describing  Christ,  accordingly,  is  to 
speak  of  His  person  as  representing  the  absolute  immanence 
of  God.2  For  the  Divine  indwelling  must  vary  in  quality 
and  intensity  with  the  receptiveuess  of  man ;  hence  as  it 
deepens  it  must  from  time  to  time  involve  new  departures, 
turning-points,  crises  of  an  epoch-makiug  character.  Of 
these  the  life  of  Christ  is  the  last  and  highest.  He  opens 
a  new  order ;  we  may  certainly  put  it  so  if  we  add  that 
in  this  new  order  He  is  unique.  And  by  using  the  term 
"  immanence "  we  mark  the  fact  that  even  in  Christ  the 
influx  of  Godhead  is  not  unrelated  to  the  past.  For  God 
has  been  coming  to  man  from  the  beginning.  Very  specially 
the  Divine  Spirit  dwelt  in  the  prophets,  enduing  them 
with  power  and  insight ;  yet  His  presence  there  was  after 
all  only  intermittent  and  partial :  a  broken,  fitful,  im- 
perfect thing,  with  a  vast  discrepancy  between  the  earthen 
vessel  and  the  higher  gift.  From  the  very  outset  the 
tendency  or  movement  of  Divine  love  has  been  toward 
such  a  self-expression  within  finite  consciousness  as  must 
evoke  faith  and  hope  and  love  in  their  fulness ;  with 
Luther  we  may  say  that  God  has  always  longed  for 
humanity  as  His  own  form  of  existence.  At  each  point 
our  thought  is  of  course  hampered  by  the  mystery  of  time 
in  relation  to  eternity.  None  the  less,  we  see  God  as  it 
were  ever  on  His  way  to  incarnation,  moving  on  by  new 

'  Fairbairu,  Philosophy  of  the  Christian  Religion,  479. 

•  Kirn,  Dogniatik,  106  j  cf.  Illingworth,  Divine  hnmanence,  77. 


ABSOLUTE    IMMANENCE    IN    CHRIST  435 

accesses  of  self-conmiunication,  approaching  always  nearer 
to  complete  personal  union,  in  creation  and  propliecy  and 
redemption.  It  is  in  this  direction  that  our  minds  are 
led  by  the  great  Johannine  conception  of  tlie  Logos  or 
Eternal  Son ;  for  the  Logos,  now  manifest  in  Jesus,  is  but 
a  name  for  the  one  God  as  He  ever  goes  forth  to  the  world 
in  self-revealing  act.^ 

To  meet  this  Divine  self-impartation,  on  the  other 
hand,  there  comes  the  true  receptivity  of  man  ;  a  recep- 
tivity deeply  grounded  in  his  ethical  constitution,  and 
capable  of  endless  expansion  under  the  purifying  and 
enlightening  influence  of  God.  The  Divine  bends  towards 
the  human,  and  in  Jesus  is  realised  the  ideal  limit  of  their 
confluence.  A  humanity  which  is  never  self-sufficient 
requires  the  Divine  as  its  very  life,  while  to  this  need 
there  answers  a  boundless  love  energising  in  holy  power. 
No  wholly  mean  or  mechanical  theory  of  manhood  and  its 
conditions  has  room  for  the  thought  of  incarnation.  That 
goes  only  with  an  ennobling  thought  of  man.  Thus  the 
characteristic  of    Godhead,   to   give   self   and    appropriate 

1  It  is  perhaps  from  this  point  of  view  that  the  speculative  mind  will 
always  tend  to  approach  the  cosmical  Christology  of  the  New  Testament, 
as  expressed,  e.g.,  in  Colossians  and  the  ]irologue  to  the  Fourth  Gospel.  The 
process  of  the  world,  cuhniiiating  in  redeemed  man,  is  interiiretable  as  the 
gradual  reproduction  in  time  of  a  Divine  sonship,  a  filial  life,  grounded  in 
and  modelled  on  the  eternal  Sonship  characteristic  of  the  inner  life  of  God. 
In  sonship  we  find  the  ideal  principle  which  unifies  and  renders  intelligible 
the  phenomena  of  finitude.  It  enables  us  to  see  all  creation  and  history 
in  the  light  of  a  single  spiritual  conception,  which  is,  however,  not  merely 
an  imperfect  human  symbol  but  represents  the  intra-mundane  self-fulfilment 
of  a  personal  originative  principle  interior  to  the  being  of  God  Himself. 
In  the  words  of  Dr.  Forrest  :  "As  all  creation  is  in  its  final  purpose  but 
the  self-projection  of  the  divine,  or  the  realii-ation  without  the  Godhead 
of  that  sonship  which  eternally  exists  within,  it  can  only  find  its  goal  in  a 
rational  and  spiritual  being,  who  not  merely  receives  but  returns  love  in 
a  conscious  fellowship.  The  filial  will  in  us  is  not  simply  our  human 
response  to  the  divine;  it  has  its  root  in  tlie  divine  nature"  (Christ  of 
History,  183).  The  past  and  future  of  mankind,  nay,  all  reality  of  what- 
ever kind,  is  to  be  construed  through  the  fulness  of  grace  which  has  come 
to  us  in  Je.-us  Christ  and  has  its  source  within  the  Divine  life.  What  we 
receive  from  such  intimations  as  those  of  Colossians  is  something  more  than 
a  Christian  view  of  the  universe  :  it  is  an  ultimate  view  of  God. 


436  THE    PERSON    OF    JESUS    CHRIST 

the  personal  life  to  which  self  is  given,  and  the  character- 
istic of  manhood,  to  need  and  be  susceptible  of  such  infinite 
bestowal,  are  finally  correlative ;  and  although,  considered 
in  themselves,  they  entitle  us  to  assert  only  the  possibility 
of  incarnation,  not  the  fact  itself,  yet  they  prepare  the 
way  for  intelligence  in  its  effort  to  construe  the  one 
Divine-human  person  of  Christ. 

But  we  have  spoken  of  absolute  immanence ;  and  the 
emphatic  adjective  is  witness  to  the  fact  that  in  Christ 
immanence  reaches  its  climax.  It  is  a  climax  which 
crowns  the  series  by  its  likeness  to  the  past  and  transcends 
it  by  singularity  and  difference.  The  self -giving  God  is 
wholly  present  in  Jesus.  So  new,  so  decisive  is  the  act 
that  it  can  be  compared  to  nothing  but  creation.  If 
prophets  were  inspired  by  the  Spirit  for  their  vocation, 
the  same  Divine  life  fills  Jesus  with  an  organic  unity  and 
totality  which  constitute  Him  the  final  self-presentation 
of  God  in  the  human  sphere.  Bestowal  and  apprehension 
can  go  no  further.  Without  bestowal  there  is  no  salvation 
from  above,  no  amazing  sacrifice  on  the  part  of  God ; 
without  apprehension  as  a  moral  act  or  process  we  are 
still  on  the  plane  of  nature.  And  in  both  these  ways  the 
fact  of  Jesus  is  incomparable.  What  has  been  realised 
in  Him  is  not  simply  more  than  the  past,  measured  back- 
ward from  His  advent ;  it  is  likewise  more  than  all  the 
future :  for  through  Him  is  mediated  now  and  for  ever 
that  union  with  God  which  is  salvation  and  blessedness. 

At  this  standpoint  it  becomes  clear  that  the  loose  and 
confused  notion  of  "  incarnation  in  the  race,"  which  has 
been  offered  as  a  profounder  substitute  for  the  Christian 
view,  is  out  of  harmony  with  concrete  fact.  Any  attractive- 
ness it  may  seem  to  possess  is  in  reality  owing  to  a  crude 
obliteration  of  moral  distinctions,  resting  on  the  mistaken 
assumption  that  the  relations  of  God  and  man  are  com- 
pletely interpretable  in  physical  and  logical  categories. 
But  reality  as  it  is  when  moral  conditions  have  been 
withdrawn  is  not  the  reality  in  which  we  live.  Our 
deepest  ground    for   predicating   divinity  of    Jesus  is  the 


ABSOLUTE    IMiMANENCE    IN    CHRIST  437 

preseuce  in  His  life  of  tliat  love,  holiness,  and  redeeming 
power  vvliich  constitute  the  essential  definition  of  Godhead ; 
but  when  we  survey  humanity  as  a  whole,  or  in  its 
individual  members,  this  ground  of  predication  is  plainly 
lacking.  Whatever  be  the  truth  as  to  the  latent  moral 
potencies  of  man,  the  actuality  is  notoriously  imperfect. 
It  is  futile,  therefore,  to  employ  terms  at  this  point  which 
suggest  that  God  was  as  really  though  less  completely 
incarnate  in  Judas  as  in  Christ.  It  is  not  even  true  that 
in  due  time  we  shall  he  as  Divine  as  Christ.  We  are 
not  called  upon  to  be  for  God  that  which  Christ  was ; 
hence  it  cannot  be  our  ideal,  or  anything  we  can  aspire 
to,  that  we  should  become  Sons  of  God  in  the  same  sense. 
To  the  end,  be  the  acquired  likeness  what  it  may,  the 
difference  of  person  and  vocation  must  remain.  To  the 
end  our  life  will  be  derived,  mediated  through  His  unique 
life ;  and  the  colloquial  use  of  the  same  term — Sonship — 
to  denote  our  differing  relations  ought  not  to  cajole  us 
into  a  superficial  identification  of  the  two.  In  respect  of 
immanence,  accordingly,  the  last  word  lies  with  conscience. 
The  final  objection  to  saying  that  all  minds  are  parts  of 
God  is  not  merely  that  thoroughly  wicked  persons  exist, 
but  that  we  are  all  wicked  in  our  measure.  If  man  is  part 
of  God  simply  qua  man,  so  that  my  experience  of  sinning 
is  positively  and  in  something  of  the  same  sense  God's 
experience,  deity  has  ceased  to  be  moral.  Thus  we  are 
justified  in  asserting  not  merely  that  immanence  is  a  thing 
of  degree,  but  that  the  degrees  of  it  are  ethically  qualified. 
"  Universal  incarnation "  ignores  this  patent  fact.  It  is 
true  that  the  work  done  for  God  by  a  creative  personality 
is  the  measure  of  the  Divine  presence  or  the  Divine  energy 
immanent  within  him  ;  but  it  is  only  because  the  work  he 
does  is  God's,  resembling  the  Divine  in  quality  and  purpose, 
that  the  higher  presence  is  discernible. 

Evolution — or  immanence  stated  in  dynamic  terms — 
is  the  unfolding  within  the  world  of  the  Divine  principle 
of  life.  One  mode  of  conceiving  Christ,  therefore,  though 
it  may  not  be  the  most  significant  mode,  is  to  regard  Him 


43§  THE    PERSON    OF   JESUS    CHRIST 

as  the  transcendent  crown  of  Evolution.  It  has  been 
objected  that  the  principle  of  Evolution  must  needs  veto 
the  reality  of  a  Person  who  is  the  final  revelation  of  God 
because  His  personal  advent  in  time,  and  attachment  to 
whom  constitutes  the  absolute  religion.  Now  it  is  true 
that  certain  forms  of  evolutionary  metaphysic  are  incom- 
patible with  the  finality  of  Christ,  as  they  are  incompatible 
with  unconditional  values  of  every  kind.  But  they  are 
modes  of  thought  which  reject  the  divinity  of  Christ 
because  they  may  be  said  to  have  first  rejected  the 
divinity  of  God  Himself — His  eternal  personality,  His 
absolute  holy  love,  His  power  to  enter  human  life.  This 
is  not  the  place  for  a  detailed  scrutiny  of  their  philosophic 
claims.  But  at  least  it  may  be  said  that  they  offend 
either  by  applying  to  self-conscious  life  the  too  meagre 
conceptions  of  natural  science,  or  by  a  culpable  neglect  of 
the  maxim  that  whatever  is  evolved  must  be  conceived 
as  having  first  existed  in  an  involved  or  potential  form. 
Apart  from  this,  however,  the  ethical  principles  underlying 
most  of  the  objections  urged  at  this  point  of  view  are 
dubious  in  the  extreme.  Thus  the  doctrine  of  the 
incarnation,  of  the  Divine  life  as  present  in  a  single 
finite  spirit,  has  been  impugned  as  essentially  "unjust." 
"The  Idea,"  according  to  Strauss,  "loves  not  to  pour  all 
its  fulness  into  one  example,  in  jealousy  towards  all  the 
rest."  Some  colour  might  be  lent  to  this  strange  miscon- 
ception were  the  forth-streaming  Divine  life  represented 
as  having  been  totally  confined  to  Jesus,  His  so  exclusively 
as  to  be  available  for  no  one  else.  But  in  truth  the  love 
of  God  is  concentrated  in  Jesus  only  that  it  may  fill  the 
world.  "Out  of  His  fulness  have  all  we  received,  and 
grace  upon  grace." 

Finally,  it  may  be  pointed  out  that  one  familiar 
assumption  is  an  assumption  and  no  more.  Frequently 
it  has  been  taken  for  granted  that  the  absolute  union  of 
the  human  and  Divine  is  only  at  best  a  dim  forecast  or 
far-off  prevision,  and  that  the  consummation  of  the 
evolutionary  process,  by    the    nature    of    the    case,    must 


INCARNATION    AND    EVOLUTION  439 

arrive  only  at  its  close.  As  an  ex  'parte  impression  this 
may  have  an  interest,  but  its  claim  to  rank  as  a  dictum 
of  reason  must  be  disallowed.  History  can  show  examples, 
such  as  the  faultless  art  of  Greece,  of  spiritual  movements 
culminating  in  a  perfection  never  repeated  in  later  times. 
Hellas  has  not  reproduced  Phidias,  or  Sophocles,  or  Plato. 
It  is  vain  to  lay  down  it,  priori  rules  for  the  movement 
of  the  world.  The  cosmic  process,  as  it  has  been  put, 
"  may  be  like  a  symphony  in  which  at  definite  points  new 
instruments  appear  even  in  moments  of  absolute  stillness. 
To  say,  moreover,  that  the  most  perfect  instrument,  most 
significant  for  the  whole  symphony,  must  appear  at  the 
end,  is  an  arbitrary  assumption."^  One  who  is  not  only 
the  goal  but  the  means  of  human  perfection  must  appear 
within  the  course  of  history. 

It  is  clear  then  that  Divine  immanence,  construed  in 
a  Christian  sense,  and  regarded  as  having  attained  in 
Christ  a  culmination  which  is  sui  generis,  is  interpretable 
only  in  the  light  of  a  great  implication.  It  implies  not 
the  contrast,  but  the  mutual  affinity,  of  the  human  and  the 
Divine.  It  implies  that  God  is  deeply  kin  to  man,  who 
is  made  in  His  image,  while  man  in  turn  is  susceptible  of 
God.  To  assume  an  ultimate  dualism  in  this  sphere  is  to 
condemn  the  Christologian  to  failure  from  the  start.  "  If 
our  notions  of  divinity  and  humanity  contain  heterogene- 
ous or  contradictory  elements,  it  is  a  truism  to  say  that 
we  can  no  more  combine  them  in  the  conception  of  one 
and  the  same  personality  than  we  can  think  of  a  square 
circle,  or  a  quadrilateral  triangle,  or  a  straight  curve."  ^ 
But  in  the  view  of  Scripture  there  is  no  such  inherent 
disparity  between  the  Divine  and  human  as  to  make 
their  union  inconceivable.  The  likeness  to  Christ  which 
St.  John  holds  forth  as  the  future  heritage  of  saints  must 
have  its  root  and  ground  in  the  essential  constitution  of 
humanity.  Man  is  the  son  of  God,  even  if  a  lost  son  ;  and 
it  is  his  proper  destiny  to  be  partaker  of  the  Divine  life. 

^  G.  B.  Foster,  Finality  of  the  Christian  Eeligion. 
*  J.  CairJ,  FundamerUal  Ideas,  ii.  105. 


440  THE    PERSON    OF    JESUS    CHRIST 

If,  as  we  know  him,  he  appears  incapable  of  personal  one- 
ness with  the  Eternal,  it  is  to  be  remembered  that  his 
nature  has  been  completely  manifested  in  Christ  alone, 
and  that  the  potentialities  thus  disclosed  are  not  the  less 
human  because  they  have  emerged  once,  and  only  once, 
in  history.  Infinite  and  finite  spirit  alike  share  in  ethical 
self- consciousness.  To  each  we  ascribe  mind,  will,  and 
feeUng.  None  but  the  personal  God  could  be  incarnate 
in  such  a  being  as  man ;  none  but  a  personal  humanity 
could  be  the  medium  of  Divine  life  in  time. 

Thus  far  it  has  been  assumed  that  the  incarnation  of 
God  in  Christ  is  remedial  in  aim.  It  was  an  act  of  love 
for  the  salvation  of  the  world.  Whatever  our  theoretical 
conception  of  the  doctrine  of  atonement,  it  is  assumed  in 
the  preceding  pages  that  the  Cross  reveals  to  us  the  im- 
pelling motive  which  led  to  the  personal  advent  of  God. 
It  is  only  in  the  light  of  the  Cross  that  we  see  Christ,  who 
is  an  abstraction  apart  from  it ;  and  it  is  to  the  Cross  we 
owe  that  profound  and  poignant  interest  which  alone 
makes  it  worth  while  to  have  a  Christology  at  all.  But 
we  must  now  glance  briefly  at  the  theory  which  denies 
this,  or  which  at  least  contends  that  it  is  a  limited  and 
narrow  reading  of  the  facts.  According  to  this  view,  the 
incarnation  would  have  taken  place  quite  apart  from  sin. 
Even  a  sinless  race  must  have  required,  and  would  have 
received,  just  such  a  manifestation  of  God  as  was  contained 
in  Jesus,  enabling  it  to  reach  the  full  height  of  its  develop- 
ment. The  very  make  of  the  universe  implies  Christ,  and 
while  in  the  absence  of  sin  His  career  would  have  been 
differently  conditioned,  and  in  particular  would  have  been 
crowned  with  a  different  issue,  yet  He  must  still  have 
come  forth  in  pursuance  of  an  original  and  unchangeable 
Divine  purpose.  What  shall  we  say  of  this  view,  which 
is  covered  by  great  names  ?  ■*• 

^  It  is  strongly  maintained  by  Dorner,  Sydem  of  Christian  Doctrine, 
ii.  218.  See  also  Westcott's  essay  on  the  "  Gospel  of  Creation  "  in  his  Com- 
mentary on  1  John. 


THE   INCARNATION    AND    SIN  441 

No  one  will  claim  to  prove  it  by  tlie  explicit  teaching 
of  the  New  Testament.  While  there  are  many  texts  in 
which  the  mission  of  Christ  is  directly  associated  with  the 
conquest  of  sin,  no  instance  can  be  quoted  on  the  other 
side.  "  God  was  in  Christ  reconciling  the  world  unto 
Himself " ;  "  He  loved  us  and  sent  His  Son  to  be  the 
propitiation  for  our  sins " ;  "  Since  then  the  children  are 
sharers  in  flesh  and  blood,  He  also  Himself  in  like  manner 
partook  of  the  same,  that  through  death  He  might  bring 
to  nought  him  that  had  the  power  of  death,  that  is,  the 
devil "  ^ — these  passages  from  St.  Paul,  St.  John,  and  the 
writer  of  the  Epistle  to  the  Hebrews,  are  typical  of  many 
more.  It  is  possible,  no  doubt,  to  go  behind  these  plain 
words  and  construct  for  the  apostolic  mind  a  wider  view, 
in  which  the  reference  to  sin  is  incidental,  and  which  puts 
the  incarnation  in  its  place  as  an  unconditioned  element 
in  the  Divine  world-plan.  But  against  this  it  may  be 
urged  that  it  would  involve  the  complete  readjustment  of 
the  New  Testament  perspective.  It  attributes  to  the 
apostles  a  willingness  to  abstract  from  the  problem  of 
sin,  in  what  is  ultimately  a  speculative  interest,  of  which 
they  have  given  no  sign.  "We  cannot  think  of  them  as 
prepared  to  define  the  relation  of  God  and  man  apart  from 
the  experience  of  redemption. 

Nor  is  this  all.  The  theory  has  the  weakness  of 
every  purely  hypothetical  assertion ;  for  it  must  be  ad- 
mitted that  the  only  universe  known  to  us  is  one  in  which 
sin  is  real.  Not  so  real,  certainly,  as  God  Himself ;  this 
much  of  truth  is  suggested  by  speculative  attempts  to 
interpret  sin  as  mere  negation,  not  to  say  an  imperfect  or 
undeveloped  form  of  goodness :  but  possessed  of  such  a 
degree  of  positive  reality  that  in  the  absence  of  Divine 
counteraction  it  will  destroy  us.  In  that  case,  the  wise 
will  regard  with  suspicion  problems  so  hypothetical  as 
barely  to  be  capable  of  intelligible  formulation.  The 
question :  "  What  would  have  occurred  if  Christian 
experience    had   been  completely  ditterent    from  what    it 

1  2  Co  519,  1  Jn  41",  He  2>*. 


442  THE   PERSON    OF   JESUS    CHRIST 

is  ? "  is  ultimately  devoid  of  meaning.  Our  conception 
of  Christ,  as  we  have  seen,  is  relative  to  His  redeeming 
work ;  strike  out  the  redeeming  work,  even  by  supposi- 
tion, and  the  materials  for  a  judgment  disappear.  The 
content  of  the  term  "  Christ "  becomes  uncontrollably 
obscure.  Experimental  theology  can  have  no  concern 
with  those  imaginary  situations  which  the  mediaeval 
dialectic  sought  to  cover  by  the  scientia  media  of  God,  but 
which,  as  the  use  of  that  indomitable  scholastic  device 
admits  implicitly,  have  no  relation  to  our  knowledge. 

It  will  not  do  to  reply  that  a  central  fact  like  the 
incarnation  cannot  ultimately  have  depended  for  realisation 
on  the  "  contingency "  of  human  sin.  From  the  human 
angle,  of  course,  sin  may  be  described  as  a  contingent 
element,  in  so  far  as  it  has  no  necessary  or  absolute 
existence,  and  we  are  able  to  conceive  its  abolition.  But 
we  cannot  transfer  this  to  the  Divine  side.  We  cannot 
argue  that  because  sin  is  an  intrusion  it  is  also  a  surprise 
for  God,  an  unforeseen  and  disturbing  emergency  for 
which  secondary  provision  had  to  be  made.  We  cannot 
conceive  of  Him  awaiting  the  issue  of  man's  first  contact 
with  temptation  with  a  feeling  similar  to  what  we  know 
as  suspense.  His  prescience  of  the  world  was  a  prescience 
also  of  moral  evil.  Sin  was  before  His  mind  from  the 
first;  His  redemptive  thought  is  as  eternal  as  His  creative. 
In  point  of  fact,  redemption  and  creation  are  presented  to 
us  as  an  organic  unity,  forming  a  single  historic  process ; 
and  it  is  idle  to  attempt  a  disintegration  of  this  unity  or 
to  draw  out  by  logic  the  consequences  of  a  radical  change 
in  our  conception  of  what  the  process  is.  Nothing,  indeed, 
can  be  more  deeply  characteristic  of  the  Christian  con- 
sciousness than  the  assurance  that  the  redemptive  love  of 
God  had  no  beginning,  but  forms  the  essential  core  of  His 
thought  of  man. 

For  it  must  be  again  said  firmly  that  from  the 
outset  Christology  has  been  controlled  and  inspired  exclu- 
sively by  a  soteriological  interest.  And  redemption  must 
still  be  the  light  of  all  our  seeing.     If  the  idea  of  incar- 


THE   INCARNATION    AND    SIN  443 

nation  is  to  retain  a  secure  hold  of  our  minds,  we  must 
find  its  great  raison  d'etre  in  the  dread  problem  created 
both  for  God  and  man  by  the  reality  of  sin.  Because  sin 
had  desolated  humanity  and  man  must  have  forgiveness 
if  he  is  to  live  in  God's  siglit,  therefore  God  became  man. 
But  this  means  an  insuperable  difficulty  for  the  theory 
before  us.  If  earnest  men  who  are  conscious  of  pardon 
and  its  untold  blessedness,  yet  awake  to  the  difficulties 
of  belief,  have  to  choose  between  saying  that  the  incarna- 
tion is  credible  because  it  is  per  se  implied  in  the  nature 
of  God  and  man,  and  saying  that  it  is  credible  because  a 
stupendous  work  had  to  be  accomplished  in  rescuing  the 
guilty,  their  choice  is  simple.  Assert  that  the  incarnation 
was /or  the  atonement,  and  a  view  of  its  purpose  so  vi^^d, 
so  ethical,  and  so  profound  enables  us  in  some  real  measure 
to  apprehend  the  fact,  however  unique  and  wonderful. 
Eemove  this  vital  reference  to  sin,  and  Christ  as  we  know 
Him  appears  in  a  purely  philosophic  relation  to  the  most 
vital  things  in  Christian  experience.  Thus  one  result  of 
construing  the  personal  presence  of  God  in  Jesus  as  a 
corollary  from  the  intrinsic  nature  of  Infinite  and  finite  is 
to  reduce  the  question  from  the  level  of  historic  and 
ethical  truth  to  that  of  speculation,  to  minimise  the 
gravity  of  sin,  as  a  fact  so  vast  and  awful  as  to  require 
nothing  less  than  thvs  for  its  annihilation,  and  to  impair 
the  sense  of  adoring  wonder  with  which  forgiven  men 
contemplate  the  miracle  of  Divine  love.^ 

^  It  is  convenient  to  touch  here  on  the  objection  which  employs  what  I 
may  call  "astronomical  intimidation."  Can  we  believe,  it  is  asked,  that  a 
tiny  planet  known  to  be  but  a  speck  in  the  stellar  immensities  was  chosen 
as  the  scene  of  the  astounding  miracle  of  incarnation  ?  Why  this  special 
favour  to  one  world  out  of  myriads  ?  Does  not  our  cosmical  insignificance 
veto  the  notion  as  a  p>reposterous  incredibility?  But  this,  as  has  been  said, 
"is  simply  an  attempt  to  terrorise  the  imagination"  (Simpson,  Fact  of 
Christ,  116).  Its  plausibility  vanishes  when  we  recall  the  love  of  God  and 
the  greatness  of  the  soul.  To  find  difficulty  in  the  thought  that  our  sphere 
was  "selected"  for  the  incarnation  is  in  the  first  place  to  assume — what  we 
cannot  know — that  otlier  worlds  are  inhabited  ;  and  secondly,  to  forget  that 
man  is  not  less  man  though  there  may  be  beings  like  him  in  other  worlds, 
while  it  i.s  only  if  the  power  of  God  were  limited  that  the  probability  of  Hia 


444  THE   PERSON    OF   JESUS    CHRIST 

visiting  us  redemptively  would  be  lessened  by  their  exi-tence.  The  real 
point,  however,  is  that  considerations  of  quantity,  in  space  or  time,  are 
totally  irrelevant  in  a  discussion  of  infinite  spiritual  issues.  If  God  is  the 
Father  revealed  in  Jesus,  the  presumption  lies  not  in  anticipating  too  much, 
but  too  little.  The  notion  that  incarnation  is  unworthy  of  God's  dignity 
ignores  the  superiority  of  the  moral  to  the  physical,  and,  though  it  may 
appeal  to  minds  in  unconscious  sympathy  with  Nietzsche,  erects  material 
magnitude  into  the  supreme  criterion  of  value.  It  was  derogatory  to  God 
to  become  man  only  if  the  end  contemplated  were  less  than  the  highest 
good.  No  one  who  believes  in  the  incarnation  would  of  course  deny  that  it 
is  opposed  to  "  common  sense  "  ;  but  common  sense  is  after  all  only  a  rough 
deposit  of  common  events  ;  while  the  incarnation,  on  any  theory  of  it,  is 
wholly  unique.  These  considerations  are  not  obsolete  because  in  the  main 
they  are  very  old,  but  their  cogency  obviously  rests  on  a  conception  of 
incarnation  determined  by  its  remedial  purpose. 


CHAPTER   IX. 

THE  PRE-EXISTENCE  OF  THE  SON. 

It  may  safely  be  asserted  that  the  idea  of  Christ's  pre- 
existence,  when  it  becomes  explicit  in  the  Christian  mind, 
does  so  distinctly  by  way  of  inferential  interpretation. 
It  is  less  a  conscious  element  in  the  faith  which  appre- 
hends salvation  in  Jesus  than  a  conception  of  reflective 
thought ;  or  to  put  it  otherwise,  we  predicate  it  of  our 
Lord  only  in  virtue  of  what  we  already  know  regarding 
Him,  as  sole  Mediator  and  our  indwelling  Life.  Were 
He  but  one  more  man  in  the  world,  not  uniquely  and 
incomparably  Redeemer,  it  would  not  have  occurred  to 
the  writers  of  the  New  Testament — it  would  not  occur 
to  any  one  now — to  affirm  that  prior  to  His  earthly  life 
He  had  lived  elsewhere.  His  career  would  then  be  dated 
from  His  birth,  and  the  attempt  to  refer  His  existence 
to  eternity  would  lapse  as  mere  fantasy.  If,  however,  we 
instinctively  place  Him  on  the  Divine  side  of  reality,  as 
One  not  destined  to  be  judged  but  Himself  the  Judge  of 
quick  and  dead,  with  a  Sonship  not  simply  charismatic 
but  essential,  the  thought  of  His  eternal  being  will  be 
apt  to  follow  of  itself.  It  will  rise  unbidden  in  our  minds. 
His  uniqueness,  we  shall  say,  has  its  ground  and  explana- 
tion in  uncreated  being. 

We  have  already  seen   that  no  convincing  reasons  can 

Literature — Lobstein,  La  Notion  de  la  preexistence  du  Fils  de  Dicu, 
1883  ;  Bornemaun,  Unterricht  im  Christenlum^,  1891  ;  Denney,  Studies  in 
Theology,  1894  ;  Gretillat,  Exposi  de  Thiologie  S^jstematique,  1888-90  ; 
Schaeder,  Theozentrische  Thcologie,  1909  ;  Beysclilag,  New  TestanuiU 
Theology,  1895  ;  Moberly,  Atonement  and  Personality,  1901 ;  Mozley, 
JiUschlianimn,  1909. 

445 


446  THE    PERSON    OF   JESUS    CHRIST 

be  given  for  denying  that  Jesus  Himself  spoke  expressly 
of  His  pre-temporal  life.^  But  only  the  Fourth  Gospel 
alludes  definitely  to  the  subject,  and,  if  we  may  assume 
that  its  representations  are  founded  in  historic  fact,  there 
is  much  attractiveness  in  the  suggestion  that  Christ's 
consciousness  of  eternal  being  is  not  so  much  reminiscence 
as  knowledge  formed  slowly  in  His  mature  mind.  "  We 
must  maintain,"  writes  Dr.  Garvie,  "  that  the  contents  of 
the  consciousness  of  the  child  Jesus  growing  in  wisdom 
and  in  favour  with  God  and  man  were  not  identical  with 
the  consciousness  of  the  Eternal  Word  and  Son,  that 
Jesus  did  not  in  His  temporal  existence  remember  the 
circumstances  and  conditions  of  His  pre-temporal  state. 
...  It  is  simply  impossible  to  imagine  or  conceive  a 
continuity  of  self-consciousness  from  Word  or  Son  in 
pre-incarnate  state  through  the  moment  of  incarnation, 
the  developing  and  expanding  mind  of  the  boy  and  youth 
to  the  maturity  of  the  man  Jesus.  We  must  maintain 
that  the  consciousness  of  eternal  relation  as  Son  to  the 
Father,  as  Word  to  the  world,  emerged  in  the  conscious- 
ness of  Jesus  in  the  course  of  His  history,  and  in  His 
temporal  condition  its  eternal  presented  itself  as  a  pre- 
temporal  form.  Independent  of  history  it  is  represented 
as  prior  to  history."^  This  has  the  advantage  of  enabling 
us  to  regard  pre-existence  as  a  profoundly  religious 
thought  for  Jesus'  own  mind — an  aspect  or  expression 
of  His  awareness  that  He  was  connected  with  the  Father 
by  bonds  to  which  time  was  irrelevant.  The  absoluteness 
of  the  relation  involved  its  eternity.  As  He  grew  and 
strengthened,  the  consciousness  of  God  as  Father  also 
grew  and  filled  His  whole  mind ;  and  we  may  believe 
that  a  time  came  at  last  when  the  sense  of  this  indefinably 
profound  connection  became  explicitly  what  it  had  always 
been  potentially — a  clear  perception  of  the  union  of  Son 
with  Father  as  increate  and  unbeginning.  This  is  still 
irrespective  of  the  further  question  whether  the  distinct 
consciousness    of    His    eternity    was    vouchsafed    only    in 

^  Cf.  SM^ra,  pp.  29,  106.  -  Studies,  etc.,  85-86. 


PRE-EXISTENCE    FOR   JESUS'    MIND  447 

certain  higli  hours,  or  formed  from  the  time  of  its 
emergence  a  permanent  background  in  Ilis  mind.  If  as 
He  looked  forward,  gradually  His  eyes  were  opened  to 
the  destiny  awaiting  Him,  He  also  looked  backward  and 
realised  that  behind  or  above  Him  lay  a  timeless  unity 
with  God  in  which  earthly  life  formed  an  infinitely 
momentous  episode.  When  such  knowledge  was  attained, 
and  through  what  media,  we  cannot  tell.  But  it  is 
natural  to  suppose  that  it  came  to  Him  in  the  fulness  of 
manhood,  as  something  enfolded  in  the  complete  signifi- 
cance of  His  filial  relation  and  now  drawn  into  clearer 
light  by  brooding  thought  on  His  redemptive  mission. 
As  with  His  certainty  of  triumph  over  death,  it  flowed 
from  an  inward  spring. 

The  conception  of  pre-existence  was  also  employed 
by  the  apostles  in  setting  forth  to  the  imagination  the 
absolute  significance  of  their  Master.  Allusions  to  the 
pre-iucarnate  life  of  Christ  never  occur  in  the  Epistles  by 
way  of  dialectic  flourish  or  random  ornament ;  the  belief 
is  put  forward,  rather,  as  a  fundamental  certainty,  and  it 
is  assumed  that  every  Christian  will  appreciate  the  vast 
truth  for  which  it  stands.  It  has  a  prominent  place  in 
the  religious  conviction  of  St.  Paul,  St.  John,  and  the 
writer  of  the  Epistle  to  the  Hebrews.  Nothing  at  all  is 
specified  in  that  life  "  ere  the  worlds  began  to  be,"  save 
the  agency  of  the  Son  in  creation ;  no  curious  speculative 
or  mythological  details  are  offered  regarding  the  relation- 
ship of  Father  and  Son  "  in  the  counsels  of  eternity."  ^ 
Further,  the  only  pre-existence  in  which  apostolic  writers 
are  interested  is  not  ideal  but  real  and  personal.  The 
love  which  entered  history  in  Jesus  could  come  only 
through  a  personal  channel. 

Now  the  element  in  this  apostolic  belief  from  which 
the  modern  mind  revolts  most  emphatically  is  of  course 
its  cosmic  reference — the  suggestion,  in  other  words,  that 

1  But  the  idea  had  a  genuinely  religions  bearing  on  their  sense  of  the 
continuity  of  the  Christian  movement  with  tlie  liistory  of  salvation  in 
Israel,  and  this  St.  Paul  expresses  in  his  own  way,  1  Co  10'*. 


448  THE   PERSON    OF   JESUS    CHRIST 

Christ   is   both    the    Divine    Agent    in   creation   and   the 
unifying  principle  of  finite  being.     On  a  certain  view  of 
Christ,  this  is  no  doubt  mere  madness.      If  He  is  but  one 
of  the  innumerable  waves  on  the  sea  of  human  life,  sinking 
as  it  rose,  a  voice  which  sounded  forth  its  message  and 
fell    to    silence,    to    speak    of    His   cosmic    function    and 
significance   may  well    seem    no    more   than    the    devout 
symbolism  of  an  uninstructed  fancy.      On   the  other  hand, 
if  we  hold  Him  to  be  the  organising  centre  of  that  world 
of   values  by  which    faith  lives,  and  in  which  it  has  its 
being,  then,  we  may  argue,  not  merely  is  it  conceivable 
that  He  should  be  central  also  in   the  world  of  facts,  but 
the  two   things — if  there  is  ultimately  a  single  universe 
— are     inherently     and     indissociably    linked     together. 
Redemption    and    creation    constitute    a    spiritual     unity. 
Creation   is   consummated   in   redemption,  which  at    long 
last  discloses  the  principle  which   has  been  operative  and 
controlling  in  each   successive  period   of  cosmic  develop- 
ment.     If  perfect  love,  moreover,  demands  a  true  mutuality 
of  giving  and  receiving,  a  reciprocal  personal  immanence 
of  life,  it  may  reasonably  be  held   that   Father-Sonship  is 
the  ultimate  Divine  reality,  of  which  and  through  which 
and  to  which  are   all   things ;    and  that  the  universe  of 
created  being,  whether  physical  or  spiritual — the  sphere, 
that  is,  of  the  recipient  and  the  responsive — has  Sonsbip 
for  its  deepest  ground  and  motive-power,  sonsbip  in   man 
thus   forming    the    finite    reflex   and   product   of   Eternal 
Sonsbip    in    God.       Many    have     felt    that     the     cosmic 
Christology   of    the    apostles,   interpreted   on    these  lines, 
tends  to  lose  its  alien  aspect  and  gains  a  secure  hold  on 
intelligence.      It  is  interpretable  as  suggesting  not  simply 
that    Christ,  now  revealed   as   Divine  by  His   exaltation, 
must  have  been  Divine  from  before  all  worlds,  but  also 
that    God    has   progressively   stamped   His  own  essential 
character   on   His  workmanship,   moving   upward   in   His 
work  to  find   at   length   in   man  an  adequate  image  and 
true  child,  who  in  free  obedience  can  apprehend,  answer, 
and  reproduce  the  Eternal  Love  which  seeks  him.      So  we 


THE   OBJECTION    FROM    HISTORY  449 

catch  sight  of  two  great  things :  first,  a  potential  basis 
for  incarnation,  since  human  nature  is  thus  fihal  in  its 
formative  idea  and  therefore  capable  of  receiving  the  Son 
in  sensii  emincnti ;  secondly,  the  intrinsic  nobleness  of 
humanity.  For  what  must  be  the  kinship  and  likeness 
between  Godhead  and  manhood  when  into  the  frail  vehicle 
of  our  life  that  wondrous  treasure  could  be  poured  ! 

Criticism  unfavourable  to  the  idea  of  Christ's  pre- 
existence  has  moved,  broadly  speaking,  on  two  main  lines 
— the  historical  and  the  conceptual. 

(«)  During  the  last  two  decades,  scholars  have  laboured 
zealously  at  the  investigation  of  points  in  the  contemporary 
religious  thought  of  Palestine  and  Alexandria  to  which 
belief  in  the  eternity  of  Christ  might  be  fastened,  and  it 
is  assumed  that  very  moderate  success  in  this  search 
entitles  us  to  discount  the  apostolic  thought  as  the 
natural  but  obsolete  result  of  religious  syncretism. 
Harnack  ^  pleads  that  certain  Jewish  apocalypse-writers 
had  come  to  assert  pre-existence  of  the  Messiah.  In  that 
age  it  was  customary  to  express  the  peculiar  value  of  a 
person  or  thing  by  distinguishing  within  it  essence  and 
appearance,  hypostatising  the  first,  and  then  lifting  it 
into  sheer  transcendence  above  the  limits  of  space  and 
time.  Not  only  were  great  men  credited  with  pre- 
existence,  such  as  Adam,  Enoch,  or  Moses,  but  even  the 
tabernacle,  the  temple,  and  the  tables  of  the  Divine  law. 
The  idea,  in  short,  was  one  which  primitive  Christianity 
found  ready-made,  and  which  naturally  it  utilised  to  set 
forth  the  enduring  value  and  felt  mystery  of  Jesus'  person  ; 
other  conceptions  such  as  supernatural  birth  and  the 
incarnation  of  the  Word  being  employed  for  the  same 
purpose. 

That  its  similarity  to  a  prior  idea  must  discredit  the 
Christian  belief  could  only  be  conceded  on  the  obviously 
untenable  assumption  that  no  true  idea  is  ever  providen- 
tially prepared  for.      It  may  well  be   that  certain  current 

*  Dogmengeschichte*,  i.  115-19. 
29 


450  THE    PERSON    OF   JESUS    CHRIST 

Jewish  theologoumena  operated  by  suggestion,  just  as 
Greek  ideas  of  incarnation  made  way  for  sublimer  thoughts 
connected  with  Jesus.  But  such  possibiUties,  which  are 
not  to  be  denied,  no  more  explain  St.  Paul's  characteristic 
usage  of  pre- existence,  say  in  Ph  2,  than  In  3Iemoriam 
is  explained  by  the  fact  that  every  word  found  in  the 
poem  existed  previously  in  the  dictionary.  In  the  Jewish 
conceptions,  be  they  what  they  may,  there  is  nothing 
corresponding  to  the  ethical  fact  of  pre-temporal  Divine 
self-sacrifice,  which  alone  engages  the  apostle's  attention. 
Apart  from  this,  however,  we  are  bound  to  ask  whether 
Harnack  is  right  as  to  his  facts.  Dalman,  an  unrivalled 
authority,  has  denied  emphatically  that  a  general  belief 
in  pre-existence  was  a  Jewish  characteristic ;  Bousset  and 
he,  indeed,  leave  it  very  questionable  whether  the  older 
Eabbinism  asserted  anything  more  than  the  pre-existence 
of  the  Messiah's  name.  But  in  any  case  the  Christian 
and  the  Jewish  conceptions  have  properly  no  resemblance. 
In  Rabbinism  the  celestial  archetype  is  only  a  double  of 
the  earthly  object ;  in  the  New  Testament,  the  very 
signature  of  Christology  is  the  faith  that  the  Divine  Son 
passed  from  glory  to  humiliation  ;  and  it  is  mere  inaccuracy 
to  say  that  these  ideas  are  equivalent,  or  analogous,  or  that 
one  of  them  suffices  to  explain  the  other.  What  is  asserted 
of  Jesus  goes  far  beyond  all  previous  assertions:  the 
elements  of  the  idea  are  new  and  are  combined  in  new 
ways.  Not  only  so ;  it  is  one  thing  to  speculate  freely 
on  pre-existence  in  the  abstract  and  quite  another  to 
believe  in  the  eternal  reality  of  a  specific  Person,  with 
whom  the  speakers  had  lived  in  the  most  intimate  associa- 
tion. This  last  is  only  explicable  by  an  overwhelming 
religious  impression. 

(b)  More  frequently,  however,  objections  have  rested 
on  grounds  of  theory.  Thus  Ritschl,  from  the  standpoint 
of  theological  positivism,  has  insisted  that  the  predicate  of 
deity  is  applicable  only  to  Christ's  earthly  life,  on  the 
principle  that  theology  must  not  ask  Jimv  the  person  of 
Christ  derives  from  God,  or  has  come  to  possess  its  felt 


THE    OBJECTION    FROM    THOUGHT  451 

supreme  religious  value.  We  want  facts,  not  theory. 
"  The  eternal  Godhead  of  the  Son,"  he  writes,  "  is  perfectly 
intelligible  only  as  the  object  of  the  Divine  mind  and  will, 
that  is,  only  for  God  Himself.  But  if  at  the  same  time 
we  discount,  in  the  case  of  God,  the  interval  between 
purpose  and  accomplishment,  then  we  get  the  formula  that 
Christ  exists  for  God  eternally  as  that  which  He  appears 
to  us  under  the  limitations  of  time.  But  only  for  God., 
since  for  us,  as  pre-existent,  Christ  is  hidden."  ^  This  is 
put  from  a  standpoint  we  have  already  seen  reason  to 
reject;  and  if  we  do  not  feel  ourselves  precluded  on 
principle  from  the  transcendental  interpretation  of  experi- 
enced facts,  we  are  at  liberty,  assuming  the  grounds  to 
be  sufficient,  to  infer  the  eternity  of  Christ  from  His  re- 
vealed greatness.  Again,  it  is  difficult  to  fix  precisely  the 
meaning  of  the  words :  "  Christ  exists  for  God  eternally 
as  that  which  He  appears  to  us  under  the  limitations  of 
time."  Either  this  is  tantamount  to  an  assertion  of  ideal 
pre-existence,  in  which  case  we  may  for  the  moment 
reserve  it,  or  it  definitely  means  something  more.  If  it 
means  more,  however,  the  particular  additional  element  of 
meaning  must  be  pronounced  unintelligible  or  at  least 
inadequate.  On  the  one  hand,  God  can  only  know  things 
as  they  are,  hence  Christ's  existence  in  time  cannot  figure 
in  the  Divine  cognition  as  an  eternal  fact,  which  it  is  not ; 
on  the  other  baud,  if  this  is  not  Eitschl's  meaning,  what 
he  has  done  is  to  negate  for  the  Divine  mind  the  differ- 
ence between  the  pre-temporal  condition  of  the  Son  and 
that  on  which  He  entered  by  incarnation,  thus  cancelling, 
expressly  from  the  highest  standpoint,  the  personal  Divine 
sacrifice  involved  in  our  Lord's  mission.  But  if  Christ 
had  a  pre-incarnate  life  in  any  sense,  obviously  it  must 
have  been  otherwise  conditioned  than  His  self-manifesta- 
tion on  earth.  And  faith  will  refuse  to  annul  the  differ- 
ence between  the  two — between  "  the  form  of  God  "  and 
"  the  form  of  a  servant " — finding  as  it  does  in  this  differ- 
ence the  very  measure  of  God's  love. 

^  Justification  and  Reconciliation  (Eng.  tr. ),  471. 


452  THE    PERSON   OF   JESUS   CHRIST 

Wendt  has  also  contended  ^  that  it  is  impossible  to 
maintain  the  personal  pre-existence  of  Christ  without 
falling  into  Tritheism,  at  all  events  if  with  Western  tradi- 
tion we  interpret  the  eternal  being  of  the  Son  as  involving 
full  equality  with  the  Father.  We  may  choose  to  con- 
serve the  Divine  unity  by  regarding  the  eternal  Word  or 
Son  as  essentially  Divine,  but  not  personal,  or  as  personal, 
but  not  properly  Divine.  To  combine  the  two  is  fatal. 
It  wrecks  monotheism  by  introducing  plurality  in  God. 
Not  only  so ;  but  pre-existence  is  incompatible  with  Jesus' 
spiritual  life  as  man.  For  then  we  should  have  to  con- 
ceive the  personal  Logos  as  having  been  united  in  Him 
with  a  complete  human  life — a  dualism  which  makes  a 
true  ethical  experience  impossible.  The  second  objection 
has  already  been  dealt  with.  As  regards  the  first,  it  is 
plain  that  We.ndt's  argument  is  valid  only  on  the  assump- 
tion that  the  Logos  or  Son,  conceived  as  eternal,  is  a 
person  in  the  usual  acceptation.  Passages  may  unques- 
tionably be  found  in  otherwise  good  writers  on  the  Trinity 
which  justify  the  assumption,  by  their  naively  uncon- 
scious defence  of  Tritheism.  But  it  is  rash  to  neglect  the 
famous  caution  of  Augustine :  Dictum  est,  Tres  Personae, 
non  ut  diceretur,  sed  ne  taceretiir}  In  reality,  the  word 
"  person "  is  forced  upon  us  by  the  poverty  of  language. 
Since  no  better  offers,  we  employ  it  to  mark  our  belief  in 
a  real  distinction  within  the  Godhead — a  differentiation 
of  being  or  function ;  not  to  affirm  the  reality  of  inde- 
pendent conscious  beings,  qualified  by  separate  "  essences." 
The  eternal  principle  or  distinction  to  which  the  fact  of 
Christ  refers  us,  we  designate  Son  or  Logos.  Each  of 
these  terms  has  advantages ;  each  no  less  clearly  has 
grave  defects.  "  Logos "  no  doubt  avoids  the  suggestion 
of  "  person  "  in  the  sense  of  individuality,  a  sense  which 
it  is  quite  certain  persona  did  not  bear  till  long  after  it 
had  become  a  terminus  tcchnicus  of  Trinitarianism.  "  Sou," 
however,  is  even  more  attractive,  inasmuch  as  it  keeps  our 

'  System  der  chritstlichen  Lehre,  368  tf. 
2£>e  Trin.  v.  10. 


IS    THE    PRE-EXISTENT   ONE   A    PERSON  ?  453 

niiud  liniily  at  the  ethical  aud  spiritual  plane  of  thouglit, 
in  the  faith  that  moral  relationships,  of  love,  of  trust,  of 
obedience,  are  not  strange  to  the  inner  life  of  deity,  but 
find  there  both  an  eternal  basis  and  a  perfect  realisation. 
Also  it  provides  that  our  conception  of  the  Eternal  Son 
shall  retain  a  true  continuity  with  the  Christ  of  history, 
to  whom  the  name  "  Son  "  primarily  belongs.  "  As  far  as 
nomenclature  is  concerned,"  Moberly  observes,  "  the  words 
'  Father  *  and  '  Son '  express  most  primarily  and  most  un- 
reservedly the  relation  between  the  Eternal  and  the 
Incarnate,  between  God  as  God  and  God  as  man ;  and 
analogously  rather  than  primarily,  in  dim  suggestion 
rather  than  directly,  those  eternal  relations  which  are 
hardly  capable  of  any  other  than  an  indirect  and  analogous 
expression."  ^  Thus  "Wendt  may  be  answered ;  but  the 
answer,  let  it  be  conceded  frankly,  is  one  which  from  the 
nature  of  the  case  cannot  be  made  really  cogent  or  con- 
^^ncing ;  for  the  realm  of  discussion  here  is  such  that  we 
have  to  resist  firmly  the  temptation  to  lay  an  undue 
crudeness  of  emphasis  on  those  aspects  of  it  which  we 
least  comprehend.  We  may  indeed  (and  must)  throw 
back  our  minds,  by  postulate,  from  the  data  of  redemptive 
history  to  antecedent  realities  of  an  eternal  order ;  but 
this  does  not  authorise  us  to  mount  up  into  that  rare  and 
high  domain  and  expatiate  at  large  in  a  transcendence 
which  has  lost  touch  with  controlling  facts. 

But  to  this  it  may  be  replied :  You  urge  the  pre- 
existence  of  Christ,  because,  as  you  hold,  nothing  else  or 
less  can  signalise  the  marvellous  exhibition  of  redeeming 
love  implied  in  His  being  here  at  all.  "  Ye  know  the 
grace  of  our  Lord  Jesus  Christ,  that  though  He  were  rich, 
yet  for  your  sake  He  became  poor  " — in  a  verse  like  this, 
so  often  quoted  with  emphasis,  there  is  surely  little  or  no 
significance  unless  the  pre-existent  One  is  a  "  person,"  a 
"  self  "  in  the  usual  connotation.  Is  not  the  apostle  simply 
proclaiming  that  the  Jesus  Christ  we  know  stooped  down 
in  grace  to  save  the  lost  ?  How  can  this  be,  if  the 
'  AtonemeiU  and  Personality,  213. 


454  THE    PERSON    OF    JESUS    CHRIST 

Eternal  "  Son  "  is  not  a  person,  i.e.  an  independent  centre 
of  self-consciousness  and  self-determination  ?  Now — apart 
from  the  consideration  that  subtle  problems  of  theory  were 
not  before  the  apostle — it  may  reasonably  be  held  that 
when  the  Christian  mind  gratefully  responds  to  the  love 
exhibited  in  the  incarnation,  it  is  not  concerned  to  maintain 
that  this  Divine  passion  of  self-abnegation  was  felt,  and 
expressed  in  act,  by  the  pre-existent  One  as  a  separate 
individuality.  Enough  tiiat  the  manifestation  of  love  was 
a  manifestation  of  Divine  love,  sublime  and  overwhelming ; 
enough  that  the  sacrifice  undergone  prior  to  Christ's 
advent  took  place  within  God's  very  being,  and  that  out 
of  the  Divine  life-fulness,  at  love's  behest,  He  came  forth 
whom  in  the  fields  of  time  we  know  as  Jesus.  Further, 
it  must  be  remembered  that  faith  no  less  than  theology 
revolts  from  Tritheism.  Hence  it  must  see  the  pre- 
incarnate  One  in  God,  not  alongside  of  God,  not  as  an 
entity  to  be  known  and  appreciated  in  abstraction  from 
God.  Thus  in  a  purely  religious  interest  it  is  equally 
misleading  to  regard  the  eternal  "  Son "  as  a  mere  im- 
personal law  or  force  or  principle  on  the  one  hand,  and 
on  the  other  as  an  independent  Divine  individuality. 
"  Not  from  any  wanton  intrusion  into  mysteries  but  under 
the  necessity  of  breaking  silence,"  we  designate  Him  an 
eternal  personal  mode  or  distinction  within  the  one  self- 
conscious  life  of  God. 

A  refuge  from  these  perplexities  has  been  sought  by 
numerous  modern  thinkers  in  the  conception  of  ideal  pre- 
existence.^  There  was  no  time  when  Christ  was  not  in 
the  Father's  purpose.  He  is  as  old  as  the  saving  love  of 
God ;  His  mission,  embracing  life  and  death  and  triumph, 
formed  eternally  an  integral  and  cardinal   element  of  the 

^  The  conception  of  ideal  pre-existence  has  been  criticised  as  though  it 
simply  meant  that  Christ  pre-exists  in  God  as  theorems  relating  to  the  circle 
do  in  its  definition.  But  tliis  is  misleadiiig.  It  ignores  the  element  of 
redeeming  Will  which  is  central  in  the  Christian  thought  of  God,  and  which 
has  nothing  corresponding  to  it  in  the  sphere  of  mathematics. 


IDEAL   PRE-EXISTENCE  455 

Divine  plan.  Thus  Lobstein,  to  whom  pre-existence  is 
distasteful  because  it  savours  of  metaphysic,  prefers  to 
replace  it  by  the  idea  of  election.  From  eternity  it  was 
decreed  that  one  day  there  should  be  born  into  human 
history  a  Person  uniquely  endowed,  and  possessed  of  the 
fulness  of  the  Spirit.  This  being  so,  we  are  entitled,  he 
maintains,  to  say  that  Jesus  Christ,  the  Divine  Son,  had 
reality  in  God's  thought  from  before  all  time,  as  willed 
and  chosen  by  the  Father.  It  would  perhaps  be  a  fair 
criticism  that  a  theory  like  this  transcends  immediate 
religious  experience  quite  as  definitely  as  orthodoxy  itself, 
and  that  to  speak  of  the  eternal  contents  of  God's  mind  is 
even  tolerably  speculative.  But,  apart  from  this,  it  is 
noteworthy  that  the  New  Testament  is  quite  famihar  with 
the  distinction  of  pre-existence  and  election,  and  enforces 
it  without  hesitation.  When  St.  Paul  declares  that  the 
saints  were  chosen  of  God  in  Christ  before  the  foundation 
of  the  world,^  he  conceives  them  as  having  had  what  may 
be  called  ideal  reality  for  the  prescience  of  God  through 
infinite  ages,  and  as  having  been  embraced  in  His  gracious 
design  to  call  them,  in  due  time,  to  faith  and  service.  But 
he  never  dreams  of  saying  that  they  pre-existed.  Not 
even  of  apostles  does  he  say  that.  Now  if  this  obvious 
Jewish  category,  which  Eabbis  had  applied  freely  to  Old 
Testament  saints,  lay  simply  waiting  to  be  used,  why  has 
he  not  used  it  ?  Certainly  not  by  accident.  On  the 
contrary,  the  predication  of  election  in  the  case  of 
Christians,  and  of  pre-existence  in  the  case  of  Christ, 
constitutes  one  of  the  apostle's  most  characteristic  modes 
of  accentuating  the  essential  difference  between  them. 

It  is,  of  course,  true  that  Christ,  both  in  His  own  mind 
and  in  that  of  the  apostles,  stands  in  positive  relations  to 
the  Divine  fore-knowledge.  But  we  do  not  exhaust  the 
special  connection  of  Christ  with  God  by  relating  Him 
merely  to  the  Divine  thought.  So  far  He  is  on  the  same 
plane  as  the  creatures.  The  filial  connection  is  so  close 
that  we  must  also   think  Christ  as  eternally  related,  and 

1  Eph  1*. 


456  THE    PERSON    OF   JESUS    CHRIST 

related  as  an  eternal  fact,  to  the  will  of  God — as  the 
timeless  object  of  His  producing  and  sustaining  love. 
The  thought  and  will  of  God  cannot  be  conceived  save  as 
imparting  reality  to  Christ.  Or,  to  put  it  otherwise,  the 
Father  revealed  in  the  Son  cannot  be  thought  as  fully 
real  in  abstraction  from  the  Son  in  whom  alone  we 
apprehend  Him. 

By  some  recent  thinkers  the  conception  of  our  Lord's 
pre-existence  has  been  defined  as  in  strictness  only  a 
Grenzbcgriff:  a  conception,  that  is,  indicative  of  reality 
lying  just  across  the  border-line  of  our  knowledge,  yet 
looming  on  us  indefinably,  as  it  were,  out  of  penumbral 
mists.  It  affirms,  as  Kirn  has  put  it,  "  that  the  historic 
Christ  has  eternally  a  central  and  universal  place  in  God's 
saving  purpose,  and  that  the  content  of  His  life — i.e.  His 
lioly  redeeming  love — is  rooted  in  God  and  belongs  to 
the  eternal  content  of  God's  transcendent  life.  Hence," 
he  proceeds,  "  it  were  better  to  speak  of  the  supra-historic 
character  of  the  revelation  given  in  Christ  than  of  the 
pre-historic  existence  of  Christ  with  the  Father."  ^  This 
particular  Grenzhegriff,  it  is  contended,  is  an  ideal  concep- 
tion placed  on  the  very  limits  of  human  cognition  and 
employed  in  self-defence  by  the  believing  mind  as  it 
strives  to  conserve  to  the  utmost  the  impression  of  un- 
speakable Divine  love  vouchsafed  to  us  in  Christ.  In 
other  words,  pre-existence  is  a  symbol.  Now,  that  the 
eternal  being  of  Christ,  if  known  at  all,  is  known  by  faith 
and  in  faith  only,  will  at  once  be  conceded.  On  the  other 
hand,  symbols  have  real  meaning ;  if  faith  speaks  to  us  of 
Christ's  pre-existence,  be  the  language  as  symbolic  as  it 
may,  it  speaks  of  it  as  real.  The  object  symbolically 
conceived  lies,  it  is  true,  on  tlie  farther  side  of  terrestrial 
knowledge,  but  in  this  respect  it  resembles  all  the  other 
transcendent  objects  of  which  faith  is  sure,  e.g.  the  present 
sovereignty  of  Christ.  It  therefore  appears  that  the  con- 
ception of  a  Grenzbcgriff,  when  thoroughly  elucidated, 
indicates  that  the  real  object  dimly  grasped  in  our  neces- 
»  Dogmata^,  107. 


DIFFICULTIES    OF    THE    CO^X'EFTION  457 

sarily  symbolic  forms  is  in  no  sense  emptier  or  poorer 
than  the  symbol,  but,  like  all  transcendent  facts  in  Chris- 
tianity, infinitely  more  rich  and  full. 

In  the  light  of  these  discussions,  we  need  have  no 
hesitation  in  confessing  that  the  pre-existence  of  Christ 
outstrips  our  faculty  of  conception,  and  that  no  theoretic 
refinements  alter  this  in  the  very  least.  Xot  merely  are 
we  faced  here  by  the  impossibility  of  beholding  the  life 
of  God  on  its  inward  side,  which  means  that  thought  is 
working  altogether  apart  from  experience  ;  but  in  addition 
we  encounter  once  more  the  haunting  and  insoluble 
enigma  of  time  as  ultimately  related  to  eternity.  And 
other  not  less  formidable  difficulties  remain.  We  cannot 
think  eternity  crudely  as  equivalent  to  time  without 
beginning  and  without  end ;  and  the  chronological  quality 
of  pre-existence  is  therefore  fatal  to  its  adequacy  as  a 
final  or  coherent  representation  of  what,  ex  hyiMhesi,  is 
above  time.  Christ  cannot  after  all  be  pre-existent  in  any 
sense  except  that  in  which  God  Himself  is  so  relatively  to 
the  incarnation ;  and  our  instinctive  use  of  "  eternal "  as 
the  epithet  befitting  God  suggests  that  the  idea  we  wish 
to  convey  regarding  Christ  should  also  be  expressed  by 
the  terms  "  eternity "  or  "  supra-temporality."  Again, 
when  we  speak  of  the  pre-existent  One,  what  is,  as  logicians 
say,  the  subject  of  discourse  ?  Wlio  pre-exists  ?  Not  the 
historic  Jesus,  exactly  as  He  is  known  in  the  Gospels. 
The  Church  has  never  affirmed  that  the  humanity  of 
Christ  was  real  prior  to  the  birth  in  Bethlehem ;  and  if, 
as  must  be  admitted,  certain  apostolic  statements,  inter- 
preted au  pied  de  la  lettre,  have  the  appearance  of  saying 
quite  the  opposite,  it  must  be  considered  that  this  was 
inevitable  in  the  case  of  men  using  the  intensely  concrete 
language  of  religion,  not  the  coldly  correct  phraseology  of 
the  schools.  Neither  can  we  simply  equate  the  pre- 
temporal  One  with  the  exalted  Lord,  for  incarnation  as 
such  means  that  these  two  "  estates "  are  separated  by  a 
vast  redemptive  act  of  self-humiliation,  initiated  on  the 
Divine  side  of  reality.     These  are  a  few  of  the  perplexities 


458  THE    PERSON   OF    JESUS    CHRIST 

by  which  we  are  met  in  the  effort  to  derive  from  history 
the  content  of  "  the  Pre-existent." 

We  have  then  to  concede  that  the  idea  of  pre-existence 
is  an  imperfect  means  of  representing  eternity  in  forms  of 
time.  And  if  problems  so  baffling  gather  round  it,  the 
pre-temporal  being  of  the  Son  cannot  surely  be  a  datum 
for  faith — part  of  the  message,  that  is,  which  we  hold 
forth  as  evangelists  with  the  hope  of  creating  faith  where 
as  yet  it  does  not  exist ;  it  must  rather  be  a  corollary  or 
implicate  to  which  conscious  faith  gives  rise.  It  is,  I 
believe,  a  thought  of  which  fully  conscious  Christian  belief 
will  not  consent  to  be  deprived,  but  at  least  theology  cannot 
start  from  it.^  The  question,  let  it  be  noted,  is  one  not  of 
antagonism  but  of  order.  It  should  be  clear  that  whether 
we  can  or  cannot  discriminate  between  elements  united  to 
form  Christ's  person,  at  least  there  is  no  admissible 
point  of  departure  but  the  given  realities  of  fact.  Christ 
in  the  New  Testament  is  nearer  to  our  minds,  as  well  as 
more  fundamental  for  religion,  than  any  prior  potencies 
out  of  which  He  rose.  Detailed  speculations  on  the 
pre-incarnate  life,  like  professedly  minute  descriptions  of  the 
Divine  self-consciousness,  betray  in  fact  a  culpably  Gnostic 
tendency,  and  are  apt  to  end  in  the  suspicion  that  when 
once  we  have  penetrated  to  the  eternal  Godhead  latent  in 
Jesus,  the  human  and  temporal  facts  of  His  career  lose 
more  than  half  their  value.  As  a  protest  against  this,  we 
can  even  appreciate  the  famous  remark  of  Herrmann,  in  a 
conference  at  Eisenach,  when  he  bade  his  audience  turn 
from  speculation  on  the  subject  of  pre-existence  "with 
hearts  as  cold  as  ice." 

Nevertheless  in  both  cases — that  of  the  Divine  self- 
consciousness  and  that  of  Christ's  pre-existence — Christian 
intelligence  pondering  on  its  data  will  always  insist,  I  am 
convinced,  on  postulating  the  ineffable  reality.  It  is 
essential  to  recollect  that  what  the  New  Testament  affirms 

1  Cf.    Herrmann,    Die   Religion  im    VevhdUnis  zum   Welte.rkcnnen  und 
SUtlichkeit,  399,  438  fif. 


THE    POSTULATE    OF    FAITH  459 

is  not  tlie  eternal  being  of  this  or  that  chance  individual, 
but  of  the  Lord  Jesus  Christ,  with  His  arresting  and 
unparalleled  self-consciousness,  His  present  glory,  His 
almighty  power  to  save.  Thoughts  are  in  place  regarding 
Him  which  elsewhere  must  be  irrelevant.  Soon  or  late 
the  question  must  rise :  Are  the  dimensions  of  our  con- 
ception of  His  person  so  deep  and  broad  and  high  that 
nothing  is  consonant  with  them,  or  with  the  effort  which 
the  soul  makes  in  apprehending  them,  except  the  faith 
that  He  lived  in  God  before  all  things  ? 

It  is  this  belief,  as  a  matter  of  history,  which  formed 
the  seed-plot  of  all  Christological  and  Trinitarian  reflection. 
Where  lies  its  religious  interest  ?  Surely  in  the  Christian 
certainty  that  salvation  is  of  the  Lord.  Faith's  view  of 
the  world,  be  it  remembered,  is  always  and  unconditionally 
theocentric.  And  the  argument  which  this  yields, 
though  capable  of  being  drawn  out  in  syllogistic  form,  is 
really  intuitive.  Only  the  eternal  God  can  save ;  Christ 
is  Saviour ;  therefore  in  eternity  both  before  and  after, 
Christ  is  one  with  God.  He  who  fills  the  soul's  horizon 
can  be  no  mere  incident  of  human  history,  but  must  have 
His  roots  of  being  within  unbeginning  deity.  Otherwise 
in  the  last  resort  it  is  a  Man  w^ho  is  given,  or  assumes,  the 
central  place  in  faith's  universe,  with  the  inevitable  result 
that  theology,  while  remaining  Christocentric,  ceases  to  be 
theocentric.^  It  is  only  kept  theocentric  by  the  unflinching 
faith  that  the  Christ  in  whom  we  believe  is  not  merely 
One  who  lived  a  life  of  uninterrupted  fellowship  with 
God,  so  constituting  the  perfect  Exemplar  of  religion,  but 
One  whom  we  are  justified  in  referring  unequivocally  to  the 
Divine  side  of  reality,  not  as  having  attained  that  place 
progressively,  nor  even  as  havdng  received  it  by  privileged 
election,  but  as  having  emerged  in  love  "  from  tiie  bosom 
of  the  Father."  When  this  is  denied,  it  is  frequently  in 
obedience  to  a  relativistic  view  of  knowledge.  Men  have 
made  up  their  minds  that  no  phenomenal  historic  facts  can 
disclose  the  Divine  noumenal  reality,  though  they  may 
^  Cf.  Scliaeder,  Theozentrische  Theologie,  175  ff. 


460  THE    PERSON    OF    JESUS    CHRIST 

imperfectly  symbolise  it ;  and  if  Christ  has  the  religious 
value  of  God,  no  one  can  really  determine  the  ultimate 
relation  of  this  practical  religious  supremacy — this  quality 
of  being  morally  indistinguishable  from  God  —  to  the 
unknown  and  inaccessible  life  of  God  as  such.  In  an 
argument  of  this  kind,  however,  it  is  too  much  forgotten 
that — revelation  and  faith  being  vital  correlates — a  partial 
and  conditioned  revelation  can  never  evoke  more  than  a 
partial  and  conditioned  faith.  And  this  brings  us  to  the 
crucial  point. 

It  will  not  be  seriously  questioned  that  the  chief  glory 
of  the  Christian  religion  is  its  characteristic  conception  of 
the  Divine  love.  God's  love  in  Christ  is  triumphantly  set 
forth  as  something  infinite  and  measureless.  But  is  it 
really  so,  apart  from  Christ's  eternity  ?  Is  it  the  fact. 
His  eternity  once  denied,  that  we  cannot  imagine  a 
vaster  exhibition  of  Divine  mercy  to  the  world  ?  If  in 
Christ  we  have  sometliing  less  than  "  God's  presence  and 
His  very  self,"  because  He  grows  on  the  soil  of  human 
nature,  as  simply  human,  it  is  surely  clear  that  the  scale 
on  which  the  love  of  the  Eternal  has  been  made  manifest 
is  now  gravely  altered.  "We  have  somehow  to  abridge 
our  once  glorious  vision  of  self-sacrifice  as  the  inmost  core 
and  focus  of  the  Divine  life.  It  is  not  that  God  cannot 
be  known  as  Love  apart  from  His  incarnation  in  Christ.  To 
say  so  would  be  false.  But  it  is  not  false  to  say  that  apart 
from  the  gift  of  Christ  out  of  an  eternal  being,  God's  love 
would  not  be  displayed  so  amazingly,  in  a  form  and  magnitude 
which  inspire,  awe,  and  overwhelm  the  soul.  A  Christ  who 
is  eternal,  and  a  Christ  of  whom  we  cannot  tell  whether 
He  is  eternal  or  not,  are  positively  and  profoundly  different, 
and  the  types  of  faith  they  respectively  call  forth  will 
differ  correspondingly  both  in  spiritual  horizon  and  in 
moral  inspiration.  Our  sense  of  Christ's  self-abnegation — 
His  lowliness.  His  grace,  His  utter  passion  of  sacrifice — is 
perceptibly  expanded  or  reduced  according  as  we  do  or  do 
not  hold  that  He  who  bore  these  things  had  entered  by 
Divine  volition  into  the  situation  of  which  they  form  a 


PRE-EXISTENCE   NOT   SPECULATIVE  461 

part.  Something  which  is  irreplaceable  drops  away  when 
His  eternity  has  been  cancelled.  The  Gospel  can  never  be 
the  same  again,  and  the  loss  is  borne  not  by  speculative 
dogmatic  but  by  personal  religion.  Especially  the  preacher 
has  parted  with  a  certain  leverage  of  moral  appeal  no 
more  to  be  regained.  It  is  harder  now  to  persuade  men 
tliat  God  loves  us  better  than  He  loves  Himself. 

Considerations  of  this  simple  and  familiar  kind  may 
help  to  dissipate  the  impression  that  the  conception  of 
pre-e.Kistence  is  incurably  "  speculative  "  or  "  metaphysical." 
Whatever  these  formidable  adjectives  mean,  they  at  least 
mean  something  which  it  requires  a  strong  intellectual 
effort  to  apprehend.  But  in  this  esoteric  sense  the  con- 
ception is  not  speculative  in  the  least.  On  the  contrary, 
it  is  constantly  found  in  hymns  of  childhood.  It  is  of 
course  intensely  difficult  in  its  remoter  implications,  as, 
for  that  matter,  are  also  the  conceptions  of  moral  freedom 
or  the  Divine  personality.  And  the  proper  inference 
to  draw  is  that  belief  on  this  subject  must  follow  faith  in 
Christ  Himself,  not  precede  it.  "We  cannot  know  the  pre- 
temporal  as  we  do  the  earthly  life  of  Christ,  or  even  as  we 
do  (in  a  real  sense)  His  life  of  exalted  glory.  The  stage 
in  His  career  at  which  we  meet  with  Him  is  after 
Bethlehem,  not  before  it ;  we  meet  with  Him  supremely 
in  His  recorded  words  and  actions ;  and  he  who  has  not 
found  God  in  the  record  of  these  three  sinless  years  can 
have  no  stake  of  a  vital  or  intelligible  kind  in  the  question 
whether  they  stand  out  against  an  infinite  and  eternal 
background.  But  indeed  the  Church  has  clung  to  faith 
in  Christ's  pre-existence  on  purely  religious  grounds.  She 
has  clung  to  it  as  the  only  means  open  to  human  thought 
of  affirming  the  priceless  truth  that  He  is  not  the  perfect 
Saint  merely,  offered  by  humanity  to  God,  but  the  beloved 
Son  sent  forth  by  the  Father,  cast  in  grace  upon  "  this 
bank  and  shoal  of  time,"  that  in  love  He  might  give 
Himself  for  us  all.  It  scarcely  admits  of  doubt  which  of 
the  two  views  will  inspire  the  more  subduing  Gospel.  Men 
sav   that   the    conception   of    eternity  mingling  thus  with 


462  THE    PERSON    OF   JESUS    CHRIST 

time  is  too  vast  for  truth ;  with  the  apostles  we  may 
answer  that  its  vastness  is  its  evidence,  since  the  God 
made  known  in  Jesus  gives  only  gifts  so  great  that  none 
greater  can  be  conceived.  To  part  with  the  glory  and 
wonder  of  this  faith  is  in  a  grave  measure  to  part  with  the 
native  joy  of  the  Christian  religion,  and  to  remove  the 
scene  of  sacrifice  from  heaven  to  earth  will  inevitably 
stimulate  the  less  worthy  impulse  felt  at  some  time  by  all 
to  preach  about  man  instead  of  God.^ 

^  It  is  significant  that  a  modern  theologian  like  Haering  of  Ttibingen, 
in  his  peculiarly  rich  and  stimulating  Dogmalik  (1906),  should  offer  the 
following  sympathetic  rendering  of  our  theme,  though  with  the  reminder 
that  at  this  point  knowledge  largely  passes  into  symbol.  "The  love  of 
God,"  he  writes,  "which  acts  on  us  in  Christ  the  Son,  is  so  utterly  God's 
love  and  the  active  self-disclosure  of  His  being,  that  it  is  eternally  directed 
upon  Him  as  B:arer  of  this  eternal  love.  And  this  not  only  in  the  sense 
of  ideal  pre-existence — for  then  He  were  but  the  temporal  and  historic 
correlate  of  God's  eternal  love — but  even  irres]iectively  of  His  earthly 
existence  ;  God's  love  directed  upon  Him  is  the  love  of  the  Father  to  the 
Son  in  the  secret  of  the  eternal  Divine  life,  or,  to  put  it  so  (since  no  other 
terms  are  possible),  in  a  real  pre-existence.  Also — to  take  the  other  side  of 
the  same  conception — this  Son,  loved  eternally  of  God,  is  not  only  sent  by 
the  Father  into  the  world  ;  He  has  come  by  His  own  loving  act "  (449). 


CHAPTER  X 

THE  SELF-LIMITATION  OF  GOD  IN  CHRIST. 

Certain  phenomena  in  the  recent  history  of  British  dog- 
matics entitle  one  to  speak  of  a  strongly  revived  interest  in 
what  are  known  as  the  Kenotic  theories  of  our  Lord's 
person.  Nor  is  this  renascence  at  all  surprising.  For  the 
criticism  poured  upon  the  Kenotic  hypothesis  on  its  first 
announcement,  though  frequently  described  as  shattering, 
does  not  impress  the  reader  of  a  later  generation  as  having 
been  particularly  sympathetic  or  far-seeing.  It  was  in 
part  the  hostility  of  the  unimaginative.  And  some  of 
the  objections  had  that  very  bad  quality  in  an  argument, 
that  they  proved  too  much.  They  failed  to  allow  for  the 
distinction  between  a  principle  and  the  forms  in  which  it 
may  be  applied. 

A  quickened  sense  of  the  real  issues  at  stake  has 
induced  several  living  theologians  to  re-open  the  problem 
on  Kenotic  lines.  It  would  be  foolish  to  say  that  anything 
like  a  movement  has  begun.  But  the  coincidence  of  result 
is  striking  when  we  take  a  series  of  important  works 
published  within  the  last  fifteen  years.  I  need  not  pause 
upon  the   books  of    Principal  Fairbairn    and  Dr.  Forrest, 

Literature — Gifford,  The  Incarnation,  1897  ;  Thomasius,  Christi Person 
und  TFerk,  1853  ff.  ;  Hess,  Christi  Person  und  Werk,  1870-87;  Frank, 
System  der  christlichen  Wahrheit^,  1894;  Godet,  Commentary  on  Si.  John's 
GosjkI,  1877  ;  Bruce,  Humiliation  of  Christ'^,  1881  ;  Bensow,  Die  Lehre  von 
der  Kenose,  1903  ;  Forsyth,  Person  and  Place  of  Jesiui  Christ,  1909  ;  Gore, 
Dissertations,  1898  ;  Weston,  The  One  Christ,  1907;  Mason,  Conditions  of 
our  Lord's  Life  ori  Earth,  1896  ;  Powell,  Principle  of  the  Incarnation,  1896  ; 
Forrest,  The  Authority  of  Christ,  1906:  Adams  Brown,  Christian  Theology 
in  Outline,  1906. 

468 


464  THE   PERSON    OF   JESUS    CHRIST 

though  it  is  noteworthy  that  Dr.  Forrest's  attitude  to  the 
Keuotic    view    has    become  even  more  decisively  that  of 
championship  in  his  Authority  of  Christ  (1906)  than  in 
his    Christ  of  History  and  of   Experience  (1897).      In    a 
valuable    article    on    the    Trinity,    Bishop    D'Arcy,    after 
speaking  of  the  subordinate  character  of  the  divinity  of  the 
Son  as  portrayed  in  the  New  Testament,  adds :  "  It  is  this 
derivative    character    which  helps    us  to  realise  that  the 
limitations  to  which  He  submitted  during  His  life  on  earth 
involved    no    breach    of    His    Divine    identity.  .  .  .  His 
Divinity  is  dependent  from  moment  to  moment  upon  the 
Father ;  and  therefore  there  is  no  difficulty  in  accepting 
what  seems  to  be  a  necessary  inference  from  the  facts  of 
the  Gospel  history,  that,  during  our  Lord's  life  on  earth, 
there    took    place  a  limitation  of    the  Divine  effluence."  ^ 
On  kindred  lines  Principal  Garvie  and  Mr.  W.  L.  Walker 
appear  to  be  at  one  in  regarding  the  temporal  kenosis,  if 
the  phrase  may  be  permitted,  as  the  symptom  and  mani- 
festation of  an  eternal  process  of  self-emptying  native  to 
Godhead  as  such.     Mr.  Walker,  taking  the  Cross  as  the 
distinctive  symbol  of  the  inmost  being  of  deity,  insists  on 
this  timeless  background  of  the  earthly  drama.     "  The  life 
of  God,"  he  writes,  "  is  for  ever  the  same  life  of  self-denial 
and  self-sacrifice,  because  it  is  the    life  of    perfect  Love. 
Out  of  His  overflowing  fulness  He  is  constantly  giving  of 
Himself  in  creation  in  order  to  find  Himself  again  in  those 
whom  He  has  raised  to  participation  in  the  Divine  life. 
This  is  that  eternal  kenosis  in  which  '  the  Son '  is  for  ever 
passing  out  of    'the  Father*   and  again  returning  to  the 
bosom  of  God."^     It  is  also  from  this  point  of  view  that 
Dr.  Garvie  finds  it  possible  to  harmonise  the  higher  being 
of  Christ  with  His  searching  experience  of  temptation,  and 
to  reach  a   more    spiritual    construction  of    His  miracles. 
"  The    miracles,"  he   contends,  "  did  not    lessen    the    self- 
emptying    of    the    incarnation " ;    for  there    still    existed 
conditions  of  an  ethical  character  under  which  alone  the 
derived  power  could  be  employed,  namely,  intense  sympathy 
*  DCG.  ii.  762.  *  Gospel  qf  Reconciliation,  169. 


RECENT    KENOTIC    VIEWS  465 

with  man  and  absolute  trust  in  God.^  Notwithstanding 
this,  Dr.  Garvie  claims  the  right  to  criticise  the  older  forms 
of  Kenoticism,  and  does  so  with  much  severity ;  thus 
acknowledging  the  distinction  just  laid  down  between  a 
principle  and  the  varying  methods  of  its  application.  In 
1907  Bishop  "Weston  published  a  work  of  high  ability, 
entitled  The  One  Christ,  in  which  a  reserved  and  circum- 
spect yet  clearly-marked  form  of  Kenotic  theory  was  put 
forward  and  defended  at  full  length.  He  speaks,  for 
instance,  of  the  Christ  of  the  Gospels  as  "  the  Son  of  God 
self-restrained  in  conditions  of  manhood."  "  We  seem 
committed  by  the  Evangelists,"  he  writes,  "  to  the  opinion 
that  the  Incarnate  did  really  and  truly  become  man,  follow- 
ing the  law  of  human  life  from  its  very  beginning ;  so  that 
tlie  law  of  self-restraint,  self-imposed  before  the  act  of 
Incarnation,  required  of  Him  that  He  should  taste  of  the 
unconsciousness  or  practical  unconsciousness  of  the  unborn 
child "  and  "  made  it  both  necessary  and  possible  that  in 
tlie  state  of  His  humiliation  He  should  have  no  consciousness 
that  His  assumed,  human  soul  could  not  mediate."  ^  And, 
to  take  a  final  example,  in  1909  there  appeared  Principal 
Forsyth's  rich  and  living  volume,  The  Person  and  Place  of 
Jesus  Christ,  the  closing  chapters  of  which  are  an  exposi- 
tion not  so  much  of  a  speculative  theory  of  the  incarnation 
as  of  certain  vital  religious  postulates  inseparable  from  firm 
belief  in  Christ's  divinity.  Taking  the  Kenotic  idea  as  clue 
(rightly  combined  with  the  conception  of  a  progressively 
realised  Incarnate  person),  he  argues  that  "  we  face  in 
Christ  a  Godhead  self-reduced  but  real,  whose  infinite 
power  took  effect  in  self-humiliation,"  and  adduces  the 
further  consideration  that  "as  God,  the  Son  in  His  freedom 
would  have  a  Kenotic  power  over  Himself  corresponding  to 
the  infinite  power  of  self-determination  which  belongs  to 
deity."  ^  The  difficulties  of  such  a  view  impress  him  as 
more  scientific  than  religious.  And  yet  in  spite  of  this 
Dr.  Forsyth  nowhere  confuses  the  principle  with  specific 

'  studies,  etc.,  234.  •  Th".  One  Christ,  190,  181,  184. 

•  Lecture  XL 

30 


466  THE    PERSON    OF   JESUS    CHRIST 

examples  of  it,  but  feels  free  to  say  that  there  is  something 
presumptuous  in  certain  older  Kenotic  efforts  to  body  forth 
just  what  the  Son  of  God  must  have  undergone  in  becoming 
man. 

These  typical  quotations,  which  it  would  be  easy  to 
multiply,  indicate  that  the  conception  they  involve  is  once 
more  striving  for  expression.     It  is  a  conception  of  immense 
religious  significance.      Somehow — to  describe  the  method 
exactly  may  of    course  be   beyond  us — somehow  God  in 
Christ    has    brought    His  greatness    down    to   the  narrow 
measures  of  our  life,  becoming  poor  for  our  sake.      This 
must  be  taken   as  seriously    in  dogmatic  as  in  Christian 
piety,  and  a  place  must  be  found  for  the  real  fact  which  it 
denotes    in    our    construction  of  the    Incarnate  life.      To 
surround  or  accompany  it  with   neutralising  qualifications 
is  inept.      The  difficulties  of  a  Kenotic  view  are  no  doubt 
extremely  grave ;  yet  tliey  are  such  as  no  bold  construction 
can  avoid,  and  in  these  circumstances  it  is  natural  to  prefer 
a  view  which  both  conserves  the  vital  rehgious  interest  in 
the  self-abnegating  descent  of  God  {Deus  humilis)  and  ad- 
heres steadfastly  to  the  concrete  details  of  the  historic  record. 
Obviously    these    details    constitute    our    sole  medium  of 
revelation ;  and  orthodox  writers  are  occasionally  prone  to 
forget  that  it  is  no  merit  in  a  Christological  doctrine  that 
it  claims  to  deal  successfully  with  remoter  problems  not 
forced  on  the  mind  by  New  Testament  representations  of 
Jesus,  while   at  the  same  time  it  makes   our  one   trust- 
worthy    source     of     information,    the     Gospel     narrative, 
dubious  or  unintelligible.      Our  only  use  for  a  theory  is 
to  synthesise  facts  definitely  before  us,  not  to  do  some- 
thing else. 

Take  the  central  thought  of  the  Gospel,  which  has 
captured  and  subdued  the  Christian  soul,  and  let  us  ask 
whether  it  has  received  full  justice  at  the  hands  of  ecclesi- 
astical Christology.  God  in  Christ,  we  believe,  came  down 
to  the  plane  of  suffering  men  tliat  He  might  lift  them  up. 
Descending  into  poverty,  shame,  and  weakness,  the  Lord  was 
stripped  of  all  credit,  despoiled  of  every  right,  humbled  to 


VALUE  OF  THE  KENUTIC  CONCEPTION     4G7 

the  very  depths  of  social  and  historical  iguomiuy,  that 
in  this  self-abasement  of  God  there  might  be  found  the 
redemption  of  man.  So  that  the  Gospel  tells  of  Divine 
sacrifice,  with  the  cross  as  its  unspeakable  consummation  ; 
the  Saviour's  lot  was  one  of  poverty,  suffering,  and  humilia- 
tion, until  the  triumphant  death  and  resurrection  which 
wrought  deliverance  and  called  mankind  from  its  grave. 
Hearts  have  thrilled  to  this  message  that  Christ  came  from 
such  a  height  and  to  such  a  depth  !  He  took  our  human 
frailty  to  be  His  own.  So  dear  were  human  souls  to  God, 
that  He  travelled  far  and  stooped  low  that  He  might 
thus  touch  and  raise  the  needy.  Now  this  is  an  unheard- 
of  truth,  casting  an  amazing  light  on  God,  and  revolution- 
ising the  world's  faint  notions  of  what  it  means  for  Him  to 
be  Father ;  but  traditional  Christology,  on  the  whole,  has 
found  it  too  much  to  believe.  Its  persistent  obscuration  of 
Jesus'  real  manhood  proves  that  after  all  it  shrank  from  the 
thouo-ht  of  a  true  "  kinsman  Eedeemer  " — one  of  ourselves 
in  flesh  and  spirit.  Christ's  point  of  departure  was  Godhead, 
no  doubt,  yet  in  His  descent  He  stopped  half-way.  The 
quasi-manhood  He  wore  is  so  filled  with  Divine  powers  as 
to  cease  to  belong  to  the  human  order. 

He  became  poor — there  a  new  light  falls  on  God,  who  for 
us  became  subject  to  pain ;  but  one  may  well  feel  that  the 
licrht  is  not  enhanced  but  rather  diminished  if  with  tradition 
we  have  to  add  that  nevertheless  He  all  the  time  remained 
rich.  For  in  so  far  as  He  remained  rich — in  the  same 
sense  of  riches — and  gave  up  nothing  to  be  near  us,  our 
need  of  a  Divine  Helper  to  bear  our  load  would  be  still 
unsatisfied.  What  we  require  is  the  never-failing  sympathy 
which  takes  shape  in  action,  "  entering,"  as  it  has  been  put, 
"  into  conditions  that  are  foreign  to  it  in  order  to  prove  its 
quality."  Jesus'  life  then  becomes  a  study  in  the  power, 
not  the  weakness,  of  limitations,  while  yet  the  higher 
Divine  content  transfigures  the  limits  that  confine  it. 
And  it  is  just  this  syuipathy  without  reserve  which  appears 
when  the  fact  of  Christ  becomes  for  us  a  transparent 
medium  through  which  the  very  grace  of  God  is  shining. 


468  THE   PERSON    OF   JESUS    CHRIST 

God,  we  now  know,  is  love ;  but  it  was  necessary  that  He 
should  live  beside  us,  in  the  form  of  one  finite  spirit,  in 
order  that  His  love  and  its  sacrifice  might  be  known  to 
men  and  win  back  their  love.     So  Browning  thought  of  it : — 

"What  lacks  then  of  perfection  fit  for  God, 
But  just  the  instance  which  this  tale  supplies 
Of  love  without  a  limit  ?     So  is  strength. 
So  is  intelligence  ;  let  love  be  so, 
Unlimited  in  its  self-sacrifice, 
Then  is  the  tale  true  and  God  shows  complete." 

There  are  obvious  differences  between  the  older  Kenotic 
theories  and  the  new.  For  the  Christian  thinker  of  to- 
day is  more  reserved  and  proportionally  less  vulnerable 
on  points  of  speculation.  A  favourite  charge  against  the 
older  construction  was  the  charge  of  mythology.  Kenoti- 
cism,  it  was  said,  was  like  nothing  so  much  as  pagan  stories 
of  the  gods.^  The  reproach  is  natural  on  the  lips  of  one 
who  totally  repudiates  the  idea  of  incarnation.  If  a  man 
does  not  feel  that  in  Christ  we  stand  confronted  with  the 
outcome  of  a  vast  Divine  sacrifice — with  what  is  nothing 
less  than  an  ineffable  fact  of  Divine  history — for  him  the 
problem  which  Thomasius  and  the  rest  were  trying  to  solve 
(and,  as  a  preliminary,  to  state)  has  of  course  no  existence. 
He  cannot  see  what  the  discussion  is  about.  But  the  more 
recent  Kenotic  statements  have  the  advantage  that  they 
aim  rather  at  proceeding  by  way  of  interpretative  postulate, 
a  'parte  post,  so  reaching  after  the  Kenotic  conception  as 
the  key  by  which  alone  it  is  possible  to  unlock  the 
problems  of  the  historic  Life,  but  not  venturing,  as  some 
earlier  hypotheses  had  ventured,  to  expatiate  in  the  domain 
of  speculation  a  parte  ante,  or  to  describe  the  steps  in  which 
the  incarnation  was  actualised  with  theosophical  minute- 
ness. We  have  learnt  from  Lotze,  many  of  us,  that  it  is 
vain  to  ask  "  how  being  is  made."  It  is  vain  to  speak  as 
if  the  view-point  of  Deity  were  our  own,  or  to  ignore  the 
peripheral    character    of    our    judgments ;    and    any    con- 

^  Some  of  the  modern  objections  were  auticiiiated  by  Celsus  (of.    Glover, 
The  Conflict  of  Religions,  246). 


THE    FUNDAMENTAL    DATA  469 

struction  of  Christ's  person  in  which  the  modern  mind  is  to 
feel  an  interest  must  stiut  from,  and  proceed  tlirongh,  the 
known  facts  of  His  human  life.  The  known  facts,  we  say 
advisedly  ;  for  discussion  has  made  it  clear  that  Kenoti- 
cism,  be  it  right  or  wrong,  does  not  in  the  least  depend  for 
its  cogency  on  two  or  three  isolated  passages  in  St.  Paul. 
We  have  only  to  place  side  by  side  the  two  words  of  Jesus  : 
"  Lo,  I  am  with  you  alway,  even  unto  the  end  of  the  world," 
and  "  Of  that  day  and  that  hour  knoweth  no  man,  neither 
the  Son  but  the  Father,"  to  have  the  entire  problem  before 
us.  It  is  present  in  the  unchallenged  facts  of  the  New 
Testament,  whether  or  not  we  choose  to  theologise 
upon  it. 

Four  positions  may  be  taken,  I  think,  as  implicit  in 
the  completely  Christian  view  of  Jesus ;  and  it  is  difficult 
to  see  how  Kenoticism  in  some  form  is  to  be  avoided  by 
one  who  asserts  them  all,  and  at  the  same  time  believes 
that  a  reasoned  Christology  is  possible.  They  may  be 
put  as  follows  : — 

(1)  Christ  is  now  Divine,  as  being  the  object  of  faith 
and  worship,  with  whom  believing  men  have  immediate, 
though  not  unmediated,  fellowship. 

(2)  In  some  personal  sense  His  Divinity  is  eternal, 
not  the  fruit  of  time,  since  by  definition  Godhead  cannot 
have  come  to  be  ex  nihilo ;  His  pre-mundane  being  there- 
fore is  real,  not  ideal  merely. 

(3)  His  life  on  earth  was  unequivocally  human. 
Jesus  was  a  man,  a  Jew  of  the  first  century,  with  a  life 
localised  in  and  restricted  by  a  body  organic  to  His  self- 
consciousness  ;  of  limited  power,  which  could  be,  and  was, 
thwarted  by  persistent  unbelief;  of  limited  knowledge, 
which,  being  gradually  built  up  by  experience,  made  Him 
liable  to  surprise  and  disappointment ;  of  a  moral  nature 
susceptible  of  growth,  and  exposed  to  life-long  temptation  ; 
of  a  piety  and  personal  religion  characterised  at  each  point 
by  dependence  on  God.  In  short.  He  moved  always 
within    the    lines    of    an   experience    humanly  normal   in 


470  THE   PERSON   OP   JESUS   CHRIST 

constitution,  even  if  abnormal  in  its  sinless  quality.  The 
life  Divine  in  Him  found  expression  through  human 
faculty,  with  a  self-consciousness  and  activity  mediated  by 
His  human  milieu. 

(4)  We  cannot  predicate  of  Him  two  consciousnesses 
or  two  wills ;  the  New  Testament  indicates  nothing  of  the 
kind,  nor  indeed  is  it  congruous  with  an  intelligible 
psychology.     The  unity  of  His  personal  life  is  axiomatic. 

Now  it  is  impossible  to  think  these  four  positions 
together  save  as  we  proceed  to  infer  that  a  real  surrender 
of  the  glory  and  prerogatives  of  deity,  "  a  moral  act  in  the 
heavenly  sphere,"  must  have  preceded  the  advent  of  God 
in  Christ.  We  are  faced  by  a  Divine  self-reduction  which 
entailed  obedience,  temptation,  and  death.  So  that  religion 
has  a  vast  stake  in  the  kenosis  as  a  fact,  whatever  the 
difficulties  as  to  its  method  may  be.  No  human  life  of 
God  is  possible  without  a  prior  self-adjustment  of  deity. 
The  Son  must  empty  Himself  in  order  that  from  within 
mankind  He  may  declare  the  Father's  name,  offer  the  great 
sacrifice,  triumph  over  death ;  and  the  reality  with  which, 
to  reach  this  end.  He  laid  aside  the  form  and  privilege 
of  deity  is  the  measure  of  that  love  which  had  throbbed  in 
the  Divine  heart  from  all  eternity. 

It  is  clear  that  the  value  of  this  discussion,  if  any,  will 
lie  not  in  the  untrammelled  nature  of  a  speculation,  but 
in  the  luminous  explication  of  historic  fact.  We  would 
know  the  limits  within  which  must  lie  the  truth  we  are 
seeking,  but  there  is  no  suggestion  that  it  is  given  to  man 
to  watch  God  as  He  becomes  incarnate.  Yet  once  it  has 
been  made  clear  that  Christ  is  God — since  redemption  is 
as  typically  a  Divine  work  as  creation — the  possible  alter- 
natives are  few.  It  may  be  said  that  He  acquired  God- 
head— which  is  pagan.  Or  that  He  carried  eternal  deity 
unmodified  into  the  sphere  of  time — which  is  unhistoric. 
Exclude  these  options,  and  it  only  remains  to  say  that  in 
Christ  we  are  face  to  face  with  God,  who  in  one  of  the 
distinguishable  constituents  of  His  being  came  amongst 
us  by  a   great   act   of   self-abnegation.      But   there   is  no 


FINAL    INSCRUTABILITIES  47 1 

possibility  of  forming  a  precise  scientific  conception  of 
what  took  place ;  for  that,  be  it  reverently  said,  we  should 
have  to  become  incarnate  personally.  We  cannot  know 
with  final  intimacy  any  experience  through  whicli  we  have 
not  passed.  Everywhere  in  life,  in  nature,  in  history,  in 
personality,  there  are,  for  each  of  us,  irreducible  and 
enigmatic  facts,  which  we  can  touch  and  recognise  and 
register,  but  of  which  we  never  become  masters  intel- 
lectually. Nature  itself  is  full  of  new  beginnings,  of  real 
increase,  of  novel  fact  not  dcducible  from  the  previous 
phases  of  the  cosmos ;  and  this  we  are  bound  siuiply  to 
report,  admitting  its  inscrutability.  In  short,  there  is  an 
alogical  element  in  things,  not  to  be  measured  by  the 
canons  of  discursive  mind.  Over  and  over  again  it 
meets  us  in  theology.  There  is  for  example  the  relation 
of  an  eternal  God  to  events  of  time.  No  mystery  could  be 
deeper  than  the  fact — -accepted  by  all  types  of  Christianity 
— that  the  Eternal  has  revealed  Himself  notably  in  a 
human  being  who  lived  at  the  beginning  of  the 
Christian  era,  and  that  the  meaning  of  Jesus  is  at  once 
immersed  in  past  historic  fact  and  perpetually  present  to 
faith.  But  if  this  difficulty,  so  opaque  for  minds  like  ours, 
is  an  essential  implicate  of  belief  in  revelation,  may  it  not 
be  that  such  mystery  as  is  involved  in  the  passage  of  the 
Son  from  His  eternal  being  to  a  life  of  limitation  and 
growth  is  inseparable  from  a  reasoned  conviction  of 
Christ's  higher  nature  ?  Have  we  the  right  to  ask  that 
Christology  should  be  more  transparent  than  Theology  ? 
Whether  we  are  dealing  with  the  surprises  of  nature,  the 
free  personal  entanglements  of  history,  the  antinoujies  of 
grace  and  freedom,  or  the  incarnation  of  the  living  God, 
plainly  we  must  follow  the  same  path.  If  the  facts  con- 
tain a  wonderful  and  transcendent  element,  the  theory  by 
which  we  elucidate  them  will  reproduce  this  wonderfulness 
and  transcendence.  In  any  case,  being  is  too  rich  and 
manifold  for  us  to  lay  down  a  ijriori  regulations  to  the 
effect  that  this  or  that,  even  though  worthy  and  morally 
credible,  is  impossible  for  God. 


472  THE   PERSON   OF   JESUS   CHRIST 

It  is  essential,  however,  that  the  categories  we  employ 
should  be  genuinely  moralised.  Our  theological  calculus 
must  rise  above  the  physical  and  partially  mechanical 
conceptions  which  served  the  Ancient  Church.  There  will 
always  be  metaphysic  in  Christology,  but  it  ought  to  be  a 
metaphysic  of  the  conscience,  in  which  not  substance  but 
Holy  Love  is  supreme.^  Nothing  in  Dr.  Forsyth's  treatise 
is  more  wholesome  or  more  inspiring  than  his  sustained 
contention  that  we  may  help  our  age  to  conceive  the 
incarnation  by  giving  full  scope  to  this  ethicising  vein. 
He  shows  that  the  habit  of  ethical  construction  must  be 
carried  over  the  whole  field.  A  real  kenosis  is  a  moral  as 
well  as  a  theological  necessity :  the  impulse  from  which  it 
sprang  was  moral ;  it  is  the  moral  constitution  of  God- 
head which  made  it  possible ;  moral  forces  sustained  the 
self-reduced  Life  on  earth  and  gave  it  spiritual  value.  As 
it  has  been  put,  the  conditions  under  which  Christ  lived 
"  were  the  moral  result  of  a  moral  pre-mundane  act,  an  act 
in  virtue  of  which,  and  of  its  moral  quality  continued 
through  His  life  and  culminating  in  His  death,  Christ 
redeems  and  saves."  ^  And  yet  in  all  this  there  is  nothing 
of  mere  dull  "  moralism,"  draining  the  red  life-blood  out  of 
a  great  Gospel ;  instead,  the  incarnation  comes  home  to  us 
as  an  ethically  appealing  act  of  God,  not  overwhelming  us 
by  display,  but  subduing,  because  enlightening  and  per- 
suading, the  conscience  and  the  will. 

This  is  too  often  ignored  when  the  discussion  comes  to 
circle  round  the  idea  of  Divine  immutability.  For  then 
the  subject  of  kenosis  may  be  canvassed  quite  irrespect- 
ively of  holy  love,  the  changelessuess  of  the  Absolute — 
with  its  implicit  denial  that  prayer  is  answered,  or  that 
there  can  be  such  a  thing  as  a  Divine  saving  act — being 
used  to  put  the  very  idea  of  Divine  self-limitation  out  of 
court.      Sheer    unchangeableness   is,  of   course,   something 

^  Cf.  a  suggestive  article  by  Drown  in  the  Hibhert  Journal  for  April 
1906. 

2  J.  K.  Mozley,  reviewing  Forsyth,  in  the  Journal  of  Theological  Stvdies 
for  Jan.  1911,  p.  300. 


DIVINE   ATTRIBUTES    ARE    MORAL  473 

against  which  no  human  pleading  can  bear  up ;  but  it  is 
worth  asking  whether  it  ought  to  figure  in  a  Christian 
argument.  The  immutability  to  which  certain  writers 
appeal  would  really  involve — given  a  world  of  changing 
moral  agents — the  gravest  ethical  caprice.  God  would  be 
arbitrary,  inasmuch  as  in  varying  moral  situations  He 
would  act  with  mere  mechanical  self-consistency.  Now  it 
is  not  at  all  excessive  to  say  that  what  Christ  reveals  in 
God  is  rather  the  infinite  mobility  of  absolute  grace  bent 
on  the  redemption  of  the  lost,  the  willingness  to  do  and 
bear  whatever  is  compatible  with  a  moral  nature.  What 
is  immutable  in  God  is  the  holy  love  which  makes  His 
essence.  We  must  let  Infinitude  be  genuinely  infinite  in 
its  moral  expedients ;  we  must  credit  God  with  infinite 
sacrifice  based  on  His  self-consciousness  of  onmipotence. 
We  must  believe  that  the  love  of  God  is  "  an  almighty 
love  in  the  sense  that  it  is  capable  of  limiting  itself,  and, 
while  an  end,  becoming  also  a  means,  to  an  extent  ade- 
quate to  all  love's  infinite  ends.  This  self-renouncing,  self- 
retracting  act  of  the  Son's  will,  this  reduction  of  Himself 
from  the  supreme  end  to  be  the  supreme  means  for  the 
soul,  is  no  negation  of  His  nature ;  it  is  the  opposite,  it  is 
the  last  assertion  of  His  nature  as  love."  ^ 

This  may  be  put  otherwise  by  saying  that  omnipotence 
— in  this  discussion  a  quite  fundamental  attribute — exists 
and  operates  in  a  moral  universe  and  under  moral  con- 
ditions, and  that  if  we  think  away  this  pervasive  ethical 
quality  from  almightiness,  it  is  not  predicable  of  the  God 
we  Christians  believe  in.  Now,  while  omnipotence  is  in 
one  sense  limited  or  conditioned  by  holy  love,  in  another 
sense  it  is  magnified.  In  virtue  of  that  love,  its  range  of 
possibility  broadens  out  endlessly.  God's  moral  freedom 
opens  doors  to  Him  which  otherwise  are  shut.  May  it 
not  be  that  only  the  perfectly  Holy  is  free  to  transcend 
self  and  live  in  other  lives,  the  sinful  being  so  immured  in 
self  that  for  them  it  is  impossible  to  overflow  the  estrang- 
ing bounds,  and  pass  into  alien  forms  of  experience  ?  Love 
»  Forsyth,  op.  cil.  313-14. 


474  THE   PERSON    OF   JESUS    CHRIST 

with  resource  like  God's  has  a  boundless  capacity  of  self- 
determination.  For  us  men  and  our  salvation,  it  may  well 
be,  He  committed  Himself,  in  one  aspect  of  His  personal 
being,  to  a  grade  of  experience  qualified  by  change  and 
development,  thus  stooping  to  conquer  and  permitting  the 
conditions  of  manhood  to  prevail  over  His  own  freedom. 
If  the  alternatives  are  an  unethical  conception  of  immuta- 
bility and  a  pure  thought  of  moral  omnipotence,  which 
makes  room  for  Divine  sacrifice,  the  Christian  mind 
need  not  hesitate.  Every  theory  which  accepts  a  real 
incarnation  must  deny  that  the  lowliness  of  our  life  is 
incongruous  with  Godhead,  and  hold  that,  as  it  has  been 
put,  our  Lord  became  "  representative  of  mankind  not 
only  on  the  sacrificial  side  but  also  on  the  side  of  human 
weakness."  ^ 

Can  analogies  be  found  which  help  us  with  the 
thought  of  Divine  self-limitation  ?  None  certainly  which 
take  us  the  whole  way.  It  is  the  very  depth  of  nature 
in  deity  which  makes  the  idea  of  self-confinement 
difiicult ;  for  we  canuot  see  how  infinitude  could  narrow 
its  own  circle.  Yet  it  is  noteworthy  that  always  in  the 
human  world  growth  of  moral  nature  brings  with  it  a 
deepened  power  of  self-abnegation.  Elevation  of  life 
means  more  power  to  descend.  From  omnipotence  let 
us  now  turn  to  omniscience.  Here  it  is  easy  to  make  a 
commencement.  We  are  constantly  limiting  our  actually 
present  knowledge  without  altering  our  personal  identity. 
We  do  this  when  we  voluntarily  close  our  eyes,  or  fall 
asleep,  or,  for  love's  sake  or  duty's,  withdraw  our  minds 

*  "  For  supreme  Spirit  subject  was  to  clay, 

And  Law  from  its  own  servants  learned  a  law. 
And  Light  besouglit  a  lamp  unto  its  way, 
And  Awe  was  reined  in  awe, 
At  one  small  house  of  Nazareth ; 
And  Golgotha 
Saw  Breath  to  breathlessness  resign  its  bieath, 
And  Life  do  homage  for  its  crown  to  death." 

(Francis  Thompson,  Selected  Poems,  28.) 


OMNISCIENCE    AS    LIMITED  475 

from  the  sources  of  mental  interest  and  enrichment.  Dr. 
Forsyth  has  recently  elaborated  these  analogies  with 
special  care.  He  selects  the  instances  of  the  reduction 
or  obscuiing  of  self-consciousness  by  a  drug  voluntarily 
taken  in  self-sacrifice ;  of  the  musical  genivis,  who  re- 
nounces the  practice  of  his  art  for  social  love  and  service 
until  "  the  first  brief  years  of  artistic  joy  and  fame  might 
well  seem  to  him  at  moments  almost  to  belong  to  another 
life  " ;  of  the  young  keen  philosopher,  who  at  the  call  of 
family  need  abjures  the  life  of  speculative  thought  to 
merge  himself  in  the  pedestrian  actualities  of  an  existence 
far  from  "  the  native  land  of  his  suppressed  powers."  In 
each  case  the  mental  field  is  narrowed  and  impoverished 
at  the  behest  of  sympathy.  Or  we  may  urge  the  analogy 
of  the  man  summoned  by  need  of  fatherland  or  city  to 
abandon  the  high  simplicities  of  refined  private  life, 
where  the  transparent  moral  situations  are  easily  con- 
trolled, and  insight  is  equal  to  duty,  for  the  coarser  and 
often  baffling  moral  perplexities  of  war  or  politics,  with 
the  resulting  all  but  incessant  conflict  between  competing 
forms  of  right  action — between  the  legitimate  claims,  say, 
of  kindred  or  old  friendship,  and  of  national  or  civic  trust. 
At  first  it  may  seem  as  if  he  had  mutilated  his  moral 
being  by  a  descent  into  the  field  of  dubious  practical 
compromise.  Increase  in  a  certain  kind  of  knowledge 
entails  a  multiplication  of  perils  for  his  conscience.  But 
yet,  given  a  true  man — of  Lincoln's  stamp — character 
visibly  strengthens  under  the  strain.  Just  through  these 
hardships  of  ethical  decision,  and  the  stern  duty  of 
temporarily  averting  his  mind  from  the  lucid  moral 
rules  that  once  sufficed,  and  of  searching  out  with  care, 
and  it  may  be  agony,  the  more  complex  principles  needed 
to  guide  him  in  the  multiform  intricacies  of  the  new  life, 
the  man's  inward  stature  and  moral  reach  expand.  The 
utterances  of  his  moral  consciousness  are  deeper  now, 
broader,  more  worthy  of  man  at  his  best  and  highest. 
Some  picture  like  this  may  render  it  less  impossible  to 
conceive  the  free  act  of   God    in    Christ   as  He   subdued 


476  THE    PERSON    OF    JESUS    CHRIST 

Himself  to  the  conditions  of  human  life.  The  analogy, 
I  am  aware,  holds  solely  in  this  point,  that  the  "  Son  "  left 
a  sphere  above  the  conflici  of  good  and  evil  that  in  love 
He  miglit  enter  a  world  of  pain,  struggle,  and  dependence ; 
yet  as  an  analogy  it  has  the  advantage  of  moving  always 
within  the  field  of  ethical  experience.  It  was  in  the 
province  of  moral  realities,  of  knowledge  at  its  highest, 
that  He  who  humbled  Himself  to  the  death  of  the  cross 
gained  the  name  above  every  name. 

Of  course  no  analogy  is  commensurate  with  the 
Divine  fact.  Too  often  we  form  ideals  of  self-sacrifice, 
only  to  discover  with  shame  that  they  are  partial  tran- 
scripts of  our  character,  and  that  we  are  unable  to 
conceive  anything  more  than  a  certain  degree  nobler  than  we 
are.  And  this  means  that  we  are  ethically  incompetent  to 
imagine  all  the  Divine  capacity  of  self-renunciation.  We 
can  but  believe  in  it  as  more  than  we  could  ask  or  think. 

How  then  shall  we  speak  intelligibly  of  the  experience 
undergone  by  God  the  Son  as  He  passed  into  the  sphere 
of  change  ?  ^  Thomasius,  as  we  have  seen,  taught  the 
abandonment  of  relative  attributes  of  deity  such  as 
omnipotence  and  omniscience,  and  the  retention  of 
essential  attributes  like  holiness  and  love.  But  the 
distinction  is  not  one  which  can  be  maintained.  For 
one  thing,  it  is  only  if  creation  is  not  eternal,  if  there  is 
not  always  a  world  to  be  ruled  and  known  and  pervaded, 
that  the  term  "  relative "  holds.  Apart  from  this,  and 
assuming  that  the  world  had  a  beginning  in  time,  still  it 
must  be  held  that  once  the  world  is  there  the  Divine 
relations  of  omnipotence,  omniscience,  and  the  like  are  as 
really  essential  as  righteousness  or  grace.  Each  is  a 
necessary  determination  of  Godhead.  "  In  short,"  as  it 
has  been  put,  "  we  cannot  think  away  the  relative 
attributes  of  God  without  at  the  same  time  thinking 
away  the  relation.  But  this  holds  not  of  God  merely, 
but  of  all  subjects  whatsoever.  Dispersion  into  the 
colours  of  the  spectrum  is  not  essential  to  sunlight  as 
'  Of.  the  argument  of  Bensow,  Die  Lehre  von  der  Kenose,  272  ff. 


ATTRIBUTES    IN   TRANSPOSITION  477 

such,  but  so  soon  as  we  use  a  prism  this  relative  attribute 
of  light  cannot  but  appear."  ^ 

Thus  to  talk  of  tlie  abandonment  of  this  or  that 
attribute  on  the  part  of  the  Eternal  Son  is  a  conception 
too  sharp  and  crude,  too  rough  in  shading,  for  our  present 
problem.  God  ceases  to  be  God  not  merely  when  (as 
with  Gess)  there  is  a  self-renunciation  actually  of  the 
Divine  self-consciousness,  but  even  when  such  qualities 
as  omnipotence  are  parted  with.  Still,  though  not  parted 
with,  attributes  may  be  transposed.  They  may  come  to 
function  in  new  ways,  to  assume  new  forms  of  activity, 
readjusted  to  the  new  condition  of  the  Subject.  It  is 
possible  to  conceive  the  Son,  who  has  entered  at  love's 
behest  on  the  region  of  growth  and  progress,  as  now 
possessing  all'^  the  qualities  of  Godhead  in  the  form  of 
concentrated  potency  rather  than  of  full  actuality,  Swdfiet 
rather  than  ivepyeia.  For  example,  in  its  eternal  form 
the  absolute  intelligence  of  God  acts  as  an  intuitive  and 
synchronous  knowledge  of  all  things ;  when  the  Eternal 
passes  into  time,  however,  knowledge  for  Him  must  take 
on  a  discursive  and  progressive  character.  Similarly,  a 
man  who  has  tested  his  own  abilities  may  know  that  all 
mathematics  is  potentially  in  his  grasp,  although  in  point 
of  fact  he  has  mastered  no  more  than  is  needful  for  his 
calling.  So  Christ,  who  in  virtue  of  His  relation  to  the 
Father  had  Divine  knowledge  within  reach,  took  only 
what  was  essential  to  His  vocation.  Though  on  many 
subjects  He  shared  the  ignorance  as  well  as  the  knowledge 
of  His  contemporaries,  yet  He  had  at  command  all  higher 
truth  which  can  be  assimilated  by  perfect  human  faculty. 
In  His  unique  knowledge  of  God  He  knows  that  relatively 
to  which  all  else  is  but   subordinate  detail.     This  is  the 

^  Bensow,  op.  cit.  125. 

^  I  say  all  qualities  equally,  ethical  and  physical  ;  for  while  no  stain  of 
sin  eviT  touched  His  holiness,  it  is  clear  from  Jesus'  reply  to  the  youth  who 
called  Him  "good  Master"  that  we  cannot  predicate  of  Him  the  changeless 
and  untemptable  perfection  of  God  perse.  There  is  a  modification  therefore 
even  of  the  attributes  which  Thomasius  calls  immanent,  but  the  modification 
is  not  in  their  essence  but  in  their  form  of  existence. 


478  THE    PERSON   OF   JESUS    CHRIST 

kind  of  spiritual  omniscience  that  seems  to  be  claimed  for 
Him  in  the  Gospels. 

The  same  principle  may  be  applied  to  omnipotence, 
provided  we  bear  well  in  mind  that  there  is  no  such 
thing,  even  in  God,  as  an  omnipotence  which  is  not 
morally  conditioned,  God  is  almighty  in  the  sense  that 
He  has  power  to  do  whatever  He  may  will ;  and  that 
He  may  will,  for  the  sake  of  His  human  children,  to 
limit  His  almightiness,  translating  it  into  a  form  com- 
patible with  our  experience,  is  very  credible  to  those  who 
believe  in  the  supremacy  of  Holy  Love.  Not  only  so, 
but  in  the  historic  Jesus  there  is  a  derived  power  over 
the  souls  of  men,  as  over  nature,  w]iich  may  be  viewed 
as  a  modified  form  of  the  power  of  Godhead.  It  is  not 
omnipotence  siniplicitcr,  but  it  is  such  power  within  the 
human  limits  as  we  feel  to  be  akin  to  almightiness  and 
prophetic  of  the  hour  wlien  the  Eisen  Lord  should  say : 
"  All  power  is  given  Me  in  heaven  and  in  earth."  Omni- 
presence is  more  baffling ;  and  yet  perhaps  only  at  first 
sight.  We  have  to  strip  off  the  false  deistic  or  pantheistic 
associations  with  which  the  idea  has  become  encrusted, 
and  to  recognise  that  what  faith  asserts  of  God  is  not 
that  He  is  everywhere  present  in  an  infinitely  extended 
universe,  with  a  physical  ubiquity  like  that  of  ether,  but 
that  He  is  absolutely  superior  to,  and  independent  of,  the 
limitations  of  space  and  distance.  But  as  the  Eternal 
may  enter  time,  so  He  may  have  positive  relations  to 
space  and  the  spatial  life  we  live.  Now  this  transcendence 
of  spatial  limitations,  combined  with  these  positive  relation- 
ships, is  present  or  implicit  in  Christ's  redemptive  mission 
■ — in  His  triumphant  capacity,,  that  is,  to  accomplish  in 
Palestine  a  universally  and  eternally  valid  work  un- 
hampered by  the  bounds  of  "  heie  and  there."  As  part 
of  history.  His  work  has  a  date  and  place,  yet  its  power 
far  transcends  them.  So  the  eternal  form  of  Divine 
existence  and  the  time-form  are  here  vitally  related  to 
each  other.  The  exchange  of  the  one  for  the  other  is  no 
negation    of    God's    specific     being;     it    is    the     supreme 


RESTRICTIONS    OF    THE    HISTORIC    LIFE  479 

energetic  act  of  perfect  Love.  Love  is  the  link  which 
binds  the  pre-temporal  Word  to  the  Hving  and  dying 
Jesus. 

It  may  be  said  that  such  a  conception  of  "  potentiality  " 
means  in  strictness  that  the  human  Jesus  became  God  by 
slow  degrees ;  but  the  objection  cannot,  I  think,  be  made 
good.  This  is  no  case  of  a  mere  man  rising  at  last  to 
Divine  honours ;  throughout  the  Person  in  view  is  One 
whose  life  is  continuous  with  the  life  of  God,  in  whom, 
as  an  infinite  fountain,  there  exists  eternally  all  that 
Jesus  is  to  grow  to.  What  Christ  is  by  potency,  with  a 
potentiality  based  in  His  personal  uniqueness,  God  is 
actually  for  ever.  Moreover,  the  willed  latency  to  which 
the  properties  of  absolute  Godhead  are  reduced  in  the 
life  of  earthly  change  and  shadow  is  destined  to  be  re- 
placed, through  moral  triumph,  by  the  fulness  of  life 
dwelling  in  the  exalted  Lord.  From  beginning  to  end 
there  is  no  breach  of  personal  continuity,  nor  any  ascent 
of  bare  manhood  to  a  greatness  it  has  neither  right  to 
hold  nor  power  to  wield. 

The  Gospel  facts  reveal  the  outcome  of  this  Divine  act 
of  self-abnegation.  It  is  a  life  wholly  restrained  within 
the  bounds  of  manhood.  Outside  the  conditions  imposed 
by  the  choice  of  life  as  man  the  Son  has  no  activity  or 
knowledge.  At  each  point  His  experience  is  mediated 
through  the  authentic  powers  of  manhood  :  thought,  feeling, 
volition,  speech  are  qualified  by  the  supreme  fact  that  now 
He  lives  in  finitude  and  must  make  His  own  finite  and 
successive  adjustment  of  the  relationships  which  obtain 
between  perfect  man  and  the  Father,  between  the  true 
Brother  and  His  brethren.  The  primary  act  of  will  by 
which  He  came  here  has  made  it  impossible  that  He 
should  arbitrarily  pass  into  the  non-human  sphere,  for  its 
moral  quality  and  content  persist  in  all  His  experience  on 
earth.  It  was  vital  to  His  human  goodness,  as  to  His 
piety,  that  He  should  dwell  within  the  self-chosen  limits, 
evoking  from  mundane  conditions  the  utmost  they  are  cap- 


480  THE    PERSON    OF   JESUS    CHRIST 

able  of  yielding  to  a  sinless  nature.  Abnormal  power  and 
knowledge,  it  is  true,  are  His  intermittently ;  but  at  each 
juncture  they  were  such  as  His  work  demanded,  and  faint 
analogies  even  to  His  possession  of  the  Spirit  may  be  found 
in  the  life  of  prophet  and  apostle.  He  was  simply  bound 
to  be  what  He  seemed  to  be.  Prayer  and  death  are  the 
seals  of  His  oneness  with  us.  He  needs  God,  even  when 
He  shares  His  life ;  and  in  prayer  He  finds  Him  day  by 
day.  And  as  death  is  the  most  real  thing  we  do,  so  Jesus 
died  when  His  hour  had  come,  lying  down  under  the  sod 
as  one  in  whom  there  dwelt  no  power  which  a  perfect  man- 
hood could  not  mediate.  "  In  His  human  life  on  earth,  as 
Incarnate,"  writes  Moberly,  "  He  is  not  sometimes,  but 
consistently,  always,  in  every  act  and  every  detail,  human. 
The  Incarnate  never  leaves  His  Incarnation.  .  .  .  What- 
ever the  reverence  of  their  motive  may  be,  men  do  harm  to 
consistency  and  truth  by  keeping  open  as  it  were  a  non- 
human  sphere  or  aspect  of  the  Incarnation.  This  opening 
we  should  unreservedly  desire  to  close.  There  were  not 
two  existences  of,  or  within,  the  Incarnate,  side  by  side  with 
one  another.  If  it  is  all  Divine,  it  is  all  human  too.  By 
looking  for  the  Divine  side  by  side  with  the  human,  instead 
of  discerning  the  Divine  within  the  human,  we  miss  the 
significance  of  them  both."  ^  It  is  fatal  to  tamper  with 
the  Gospel  stories  by  checking  our  first  instinct  to 
understand  them  humanly ;  by  applying  an  unknown 
standard  of  divinity  we  shall  but  lose  the  man,  and  be 
no  nearer  God. 

This,  however,  brings  up  the  question  whether  the  Son 
Incarnate  can  ever  have  known  Himself  to  be  Divine.  Was 
the  Jcenosis  such  that  it  annulled  even  the  consciousness  of 
a  higher  relationship  ?  Some  writers  have  contended  that 
to  the  end  Christ  remained  unaware  of  His  being  God 
in  flesh,  urging  that  on  no  other  terms  can  we  assert  the 
genuinely  human  character  of  His  experience.  In  par- 
ticular, it  has  been  held  that  while  sin  was  an  impossibility 
for  Jesus,  we  may  conceive  this  impossibility  as  having  been 

'  Atonement  and  Personality,  97. 


JESUS'    CONSCIOUSNESS   OF    DIVINITY  481 

bidden  from  Himself,  so  that  Ke  faced  each  new  conflict 
with  that  reality  of  effort,  that  refusal  to  count  the  issue  a 
foregone  conclusion  which  is  vitally  characteristic  of  moral 
life.  And  from  this  it  might  seem  to  follow  that  His 
primary  descent  into  the  sphere  of  finitude  had  veiled  in 
nescience  His  eternal  relationship  to  the  Father.  Yet  we 
need  not  entangle  the  two  positions  with  each  other.  It 
can  only  have  been  in  mature  manhood  and  perhaps  inter- 
mittently that  Christ  became  aware  of  His  divinity— which 
must  have  remained  for  Him  an  object  ol  faith  to  the  very 
end.  Xow,  if  incarnation  means  Divine  self-subjection  to 
the  conditions  of  our  life,  it  does  not  appear  that  even 
such  a  discovery  on  Christ's  part  of  His  own  essential  Son- 
ship  must  inevitably  suggest  to  Him  the  total  impossibility 
of  moral  failure.  But  while  His  assurance  of  victory  can 
never  have  been  mechanical,  or  such  as  to  dispense  Him 
from  vigilance,  or  effort,  or  seasons  of  depression,  it  was  none 
the  less  real  and  commanding.  There  is  no  reason  why  His 
consciousness  of  unique  intimacy  with  the  Father,  and  of 
the  crucial  importance  of  His  mission,  should  not  have  im- 
parted to  Jesus,  in  each  temptation,  a  firmly-based  con- 
fidence of  victory,  though  He  knew  not  in  advance  how  or 
how  soon  the  final  triumph  would  be  vouchsafed. 

In  any  case,  it  is  only  by  degrees  that  the  full  meaning 
of  His  relationship  to  the  Father,  with  its  eternal  implicates, 
can  have  broken  on  Jesus'  mind.  The  self-sacrifice  in 
which  His  earthly  life  originated  drew  a  veil  over  these 
ultimate  realities.  But  if  He  lives  in  glory  now,  and  if  an 
uninterrupted  unity  binds  the  present  majesty  to  the 
mortal  career,  we  are  led  to  believe  that  the  veil  must 
gradually  have  worn  thinner  and  more  translucent,  until, 
at  least  in  high  moments  of  visitation,  He  knew  Himself 
to  be  God  conditioned  in  and  by  humanity.  In  whatever 
ways  the  significance  of  His  relationship  to  God  betrayed 
itself,  His  unshared  unity  with  the  Father  must  at  length 
have  come  to  stand  before  His  mind  definitely  as  constitu- 
tive of  His  personality.  Otherwise  we  should  have  to 
think  of  some  moment  of  mysterious  apocalypse — at  the 
31 


482  THE   PERSON    OF   JESUS    CHRIST 

resurrection  presumably — when  in  conditions  to  which  we 
can  attach  no  ethical  significance  the  Eisen  Lord  awoke  to 
His  own  divinity.  This  has  no  relation  to  the  data  of  the 
New  Testament.  The  subject,  however,  of  the  gradual  ex- 
pansion of  the  Divine-human  experience  will  come  before  us 
in  the  next  chapter.  I  only  note  here  in  passing  what 
will  there  be  dwelt  on. 

It  would  seem  that  the  self -imposition  of  limits  by 
Divine  love  must  be  conceived  of  as  a  great  supra-temporal 
act  by  which,  in  the  almightiness  of  grace,  the  Son  chose 
to  pass  into  human  life.  An  infinitely  pregnant  act ;  for 
in  truth  it  involved  all  the  conflict,  renunciation,  and 
achievement  of  the  life  to  which  it  was  the  prelude.  But 
it  is  not  possible  to  conceive  of  this  act  as  having  been 
continuously  repeated  throughout  the  earthly  life.  We 
cannot  think  of  the  Incarnate  One  as  confining  Himself 
from  moment  to  moment,  by  explicit  volition,  within  the 
frontiers  of  manhood.  That  would  simply  lead  back  to  the 
old  untenable  conception  of  a  krypsis  by  which  the  Divine 
Self  in  Christ  veils  His  loftier  attributes,  now  less  now 
more,  and  is  actuated  in  each  case  by  didactic  motives. 
To  return  thus  to  a  theoretic  duality  of  mental  life  in  our 
Lord  against  which  all  modern  Christology  has  been  a 
protest,  is  surely  to  sin  against  light.  The  acceptance  of 
human  relationships — to  nature,  to  man,  to  God — belongs 
to  the  eternal  or  transcendent  sphere,  as  a  definitive  settled 
act ;  it  is  not  something  consciously  and  continuously  re- 
newed in  time.  What  is  continuous  with  the  decisive  act 
of  self-reduction  is  the  moral  quality  of  the  life  on  earth, 
the  permanent  self-consecration  of  Jesus'  will.  But  the 
self-limitation,  transcendently  achieved  as  a  single,  final 
deed,  inaugurates  a  permanent  condition  or  state  of  life, 
amid  circumstances  of  change  and  suffering  once  for  all 
accepted. 

Two  lines  of  argument  often  supposed  to  be  vital  to 
a  complete  Kenotic  statement  are  noticeably  absent  from 
the  foregoing  exposition.      First,  no  psychological   theory  is 


QUESTIONS    HERE    PUT    ASIDE  483 

attempted  as  to  the  relations  of  the  Divine  and  the  human 
in  Christ.  All  ellbrts  to  divide  the  ground  here  go  astray. 
To  construct  a  theory  of  how  two  streams  of  consciousness 
or  will  co-existed,  or  mingled,  in  the  same  personality,  we 
must  first  ascertain  that  there  are  two  streams ;  and  this 
has  never  yet  been  proved.  What  seems  evidence  of  the 
dualism  is  that  mysterious  clairvoyance  on  Christ's  part,  in 
hours  of  exalted  self-consciousness,  which  recurs  at  intervals 
in  the  Gospel  story.  This,  liowever,  in  no  way  represents 
a  mental  or  spiritual  duality  ;  it  is  ratlier  a  profound  and 
luminous  intuition  on  Jesus'  part  of  His  own  infinite 
significance  both  for  God  and  man.  Besides,  the  ethical 
interpretation  of  motive  and  meaning  is  of  more  importance 
than  any  psychological  theory  of  method.  Exactly  how 
the  Divine  qualities  in  Christ,  brought  from  the  eternal 
sphere,  were  adjusted  to  the  human  lot  we  do  not  know 
and  cannot  tell ;  but  the  redemption  He  accomplished  by 
life  and  death  and  victory  is  proof  that  the  truth  of  God- 
head was  His  inmost  being,  while  yet  He  was  our  brother 
in  humanity. 

In  the  second  place,  our  exposition  is  silent  as  to  the 
"  Word  "  or  "  Son  "  apart  from  His  incarnation.  In  the  older 
theology  much  is  said  as  to  the  Logos  extra  carnem — in 
traditional  phrase  —  as  constituting  the  permanent  and 
essential  background  of  the  Logos  in  flesh.  It  is  held  that 
we  can  make  aliirmatious  as  to  the  unbroken  maintenance 
of  cosmic  functions  by  the  infinite  Logos,  "  filling  all  things 
and  uncircumscribed  of  any,"  even  during  the  earthly  life 
of  Jesus ;  the  Logos  unlimited,  that  is,  not  only  furnishes 
the  power  of  the  Incarnate  life,  but  simultaneously  lives 
in  a  universal  creative  relationship  to  the  cosmos  as  a 
whole,  to  which  the  human  and  developing  relations  of 
the  Incarnate  sphere  are  simply  additional,  though  with 
an  independence  of  their  own.  The  Word  or  Son  is  thus 
described  as  living  at  two  centres,  united  indeed  by  what 
we  may  call  continuity  of  personal  bcii  g — as  the  bay  is 
still  one  with  the  vast  ocean — yet  distinct  in  scope  and 
dispensation :  on  the  one  hand,  the  Word  omnipotent  and 


484  THE   PERSON    OF   JESUS    CHEIST 

omuiscient,  who  dwells  in  all  creatures  by  virtue  of 
inalienable  ubiquity,  on  the  other  the  Word  voluntarily 
restrained  in  manhood.  And  of  these  two  co-existing 
states,  the  eternal  and  changeless  state  is  the  abiding 
dynamic  ground  of  the  temporal. 

My  reason  for  passing  over  this  in  silence  is  not 
that  various  analogies — more  or  less  relevant  and  instruct- 
ive— could  not  be  adduced  to  illustrate  the  idea  of  a 
personality  functioning  in  a  dual  relationship  to  its  en- 
vironment. ^  Yet  even  so,  a  closer  scrutiny  reveals  the 
fact  that  all  such  analogies  are  defective  at  one  or  more 
vital  points.  Thus,  to  take  one  detail,  the  Logos  incarnate 
has  ex  hypothesi  no  direct  knowledge  of  the  cosmic 
activities  predicated  of  the  Logos  extra  carnem.  But  there 
are  two  considerations  of  more  importance.  First,  the  New 
Testament  data  are  insufficient.  Bishop  Weston  has  said 
that  "  the  general  tendency  of  the  New  Testament  is 
towards  the  doctrine  of  the  permanence  of  the  universal 
life  and  cosmic  functions  of  the  eternal  Word "  ^ — their 
permanence,  i.e.,  during  Christ's  life  on  earth.  But  the 
phrases  he  has  cited  from  St.  Paul  and  the  Epistle  to  the 
Hebrews  can  be  made  to  carry  his  interpretation  only  by 
a  petitio  principii ;  for  in  both  writers  the  term  Son,  as 
scholars  are  virtually  agreed,  has  reference  primarily  to  the 
historic  and  exalted  Christ.  Nothing  else  can  be  assumed 
to  be  in  view.  At  most,  then,  apostolic  statements  on  the 
subject — even  if  we  suppose  them  to  have  had  the  problem 
before  their  minds — leave  it  undecided.  St.  John  does  not 
even  know  what  is  meant  by  the  "  Word  incarnate  "  without 
looking  at  the  story  of  Jesus ;  and  we  may  therefore  regard 
it  as  improbable  that  he  would  have  cared  to  enter  on 
speculations  as  to  the  non-incarnate  Word. 

Secondly,  it  is  scarcely  possible  at  this  point  to  acquit 
certain  traditional  arguments  of  a  tendency  to  ditheism. 
Thus  it  is  urged  that  the  cessation  of  the  incarnate  Word 
from  His  universal  activities  must  produce  a  cosmic  chaos. 
But  a  plea  so  dubious  would  seem  to  involve  the  far  greater 

1  See  for  example  Weston,  op.  cU.  151.  ^  Ibid.  115. 


EITSCHL    AND    KENOTICISM  485 

religious  peril  of  so  separating  tLe  Father  from  the  Son  in  a 
cosmic  reference  as  to  endanger  the  monotheistic  view  of 
the  Trinity  and  negative  the  inseparahilis  trinitatis  operatio 
so  memorably  emphasised  by  Augustine.  If  the  term 
"  person  "  in  Trinitarian  doctrine  is  more  than  "  aspect,"  it 
is  certainly  less  than  "  individual."  After  all,  it  is  a  funda- 
mental truth  that  the  world  is  upheld  by  God,  not  by  a 
constituent  or  part  of  God.  There  are  spheres  in  which 
division  of  labour  is  unmeaning.  We  must  simply  confess 
that  we  know  nothing  of  an  existence  of  the  Logos  apart 
from  but  synchronous  with  His  reality  in  Jesus,  and  that 
statements  of  a  dogmatic  character  on  the  subject  have  no 
apprehensible  reality  for  our  minds. 

It  will  be  seen  that  these  considerations  bear  with 
equal  force  on  theories  of  an  opposite  kind.  They  bear,  for 
instance,  on  Godet's  view  that  during  the  period  of  the 
earthly  life,  when  the  existence  of  the  Son  within  the  God- 
head was  interrupted  for  a  time,  the  Father  Himself  effected 
what  is  normally  effected  by  the  mediation  of  the  Word.^ 
But  this  is  to  be  wise  above  what  is  written.  Over  all 
such  problems  there  hangs  a  curtain,  alike  for  discursive 
knowledge  and  for  faith.  And  no  employment  can  be  less 
rewarding  than  the  construction  of  hypotbeises  for  which  we 
possess  no  data. 

Perhaps  the  strongest  blow  aimed  at  the  Kenotic 
principle  came  from  Eitschl,  when  he  said  that  by  very 
definition  it  deprives  us  of  the  right  to  say  that  we  find 
God  in  Jesus.  For  the  Kenotist,  as  he  puts  it,  "  Christ, 
at  least  in  His  earthly  existence,  has  no  Godhead  at  all."  * 
Were  the  charge  made  out,  it  would  mean  that  the  incrimin- 
ated class  had  repeated  the  mistake  of  the  earlier  Logos 
Christology,  which,  as  we  have  seen,  taught  men  to  find  in 
Jesus,  not  God  Himself,  but  an  inferior  Divine  essence.  A 
full  reply  to  the  accusation  would  have  to  inquire  whether 
the  Eitschlian  conception  of  what  is  meant  by  predicating 

*  Commentary  on  St.  John's  Gospel. 

*  Justijication  and  EecoacUialion  (E.T.),  410. 


486  THE    PERSON    OF    JESUS    CHRIST 

Godhead  of  the  historic  Christ  is  itself  satisfactory.  It  may 
be  pointed  out,  however,  that  what  Eitschl  regards  as 
an  insuperable  difficulty — the  absence  of  certain  Divine 
qualities — is  simply  essential  to  the  personal  advent  of  God 
in  time.  Surely  there  is  truth  in  the  argument  of  a 
suggestive  writer,  that  wherever  God  reveals  Himself,  the 
veiling  is  as  real  as  the  revelation.  "  Chemistry  does  not 
show  any  more  of  Him  than  there  is  in  chemistry ;  the 
revelation  will  be  all  shut  up  within  its  laws  and  limitations. 
May  we  not  expect  that  in  history,  on  the  plane  of  human 
affairs,  the  same  law  will  obtain  ?  If  God  does  not  put 
more  of  Himself  into  chemistry  than  chemistry  will  hold, 
we  may  expect  that  He  will  not  put  more  of  Himself  into 
humanity  than  humanity  will  hold.  And  thus  the  self- 
limitation,  the  self-emptying  of  Deity  which  we  are  told  is 
an  impossible  conception,  becomes  the  first  condition  of  any 
revelation  at  all."  ^  The  position  defended  here  is  that 
only  so — only  by  contracting  His  Divine  fulness  within 
earthly  limits — could  the  redeeming  God  draw  nigh  to 
man.  Further,  the  life  of  Jesus  exhibits  to  us  precisely 
that  rendering  of  true  deity  in  human  terms,  that  absolute 
perfectness  of  life  "  in  short  measures,"  which  answers  to 
the  Kenotic  principle  as  rightly  understood.  We  read  the 
Gospels,  and  we  find  that  in  Jesus  there  was  faith  and  hope 
and  love  in  perfect  fulness ;  that  He  lived  in  unbroken 
intimacy  with  the  Father ;  that  He  manifested  God  to  men 
as  absolute  holiness,  love,  and  freedom  ;  that  He  acted  a 
Divine  part  in  the  experience  of  the  sinful,  forgiving  their 
iniquities  and  imparting  a  new  and  blessed  life.  In  Him 
there  is  realised  on  earth  the  human  life  of  God,  and  it  is 
a  life  whose  chiefest  glory  consists  in  a  voluntary  descent 
from  depth  to  depth  of  our  experience.  It  is  the  personal 
presence  of  God  in  One  who  is  neither  omniscient  nor 
ubiquitous  nor  almighty — as  God  per  se  must  be — but  is 
perfect  Love  and  Holiness  and  Freedom  in  terms  of  perfect 
humanity. 

*  Brierley,  Aspects  of  the  Spiritual,  85. 


DR.  sanday's  psychological  theory       487 


NOTE  ON  DR.  SANDAY'S  PSYCHOLOGICAL  THEORY. 

In  his  Christolo(jies  Ancient  and  Modern  (1910),  Dr.  Sanday 
has  outlined  a  new  and  hitlierto  unexplored  view  of  our  Lord's 
person  which  we  notice  here  both  for  its  extremely  stimulating 
quality  and  for  the  vivacious  debate  evoked  by  it.  He  is  con- 
vinced that  we  understand  the  incarnation  better  by  using  the 
analogy  of  the  meeting  of  Divine  and  human  in  ourselves.  Now 
"the  proper  seat  or  locus  of  all  divine  indwelling,  or  divine 
action  upon  the  human  soul,  is  the  subliminal  consciousness " 
(p.  159).  The  influence  of  the  Sjiirit  plays  upon  the  roots  of 
our  being.  In  comparison  with  conscious  states  the  subconscious 
are  "subtler,  intenser,  further-reaching,  more  penetrating.  It 
is  something  more  than  a  mere  metaphor  when  we  describe  the 
sub-  and  unconscious  states  as  more  'profound'"  (p.  145).  This 
is  illustrated  from  another  sphere.  "  The  deepest  truth  of 
mysticism,  and  of  the  states  of  which  we  have  been  speaking  as 
mystical,  belongs  not  so  much  to  the  upper  region  of  conscious- 
ness— the  region  of  symptoms,  manifestations,  effects — as  to  the 
lower  region  of  the  unconscious"  (p.  155).  And  the  novel 
feature  of  Dr.  Sanday's  theory  is  the  definite  position  that  "  the 
same,  or  the  corresponding  subliminal  consciousness  is  the  proper 
seat  or  locus  of  the  Deity  of  the  incarnate  Christ"  (p.  159). 
Thus  we  are  to  conceive  the  union  of  the  human  and  Divine  in 
Christ.  We  may  draw  a  horizontal  line,  he  writes,  "  between 
the  upper  human  medium,  which  is  the  proper  and  natural  field 
of  all  active  expression,  and  those  lower  deeps  which  are  no  less 
the  proper  and  natural  home  of  whatever  is  divine.  This  line  is 
inevitably  drawn  in  the  region  of  the  subconscious.  .  .  .  What- 
ever there  was  of  divine  in  11  im,  on  its  way  to  expression  whether 
in  speech  or  act,  passed  through,  and  could  not  but  pass  through, 
the  restricting  and  restraining  medium  of  human  consciousness. 
This  consciousness  was,  as  it  were,  the  narrow  neck  through 
which  alone  the  divine  could  come  to  expression  "  (pp.  165-67). 
Dr.  Sanday  lays  stress  on  this  figure  of  the  "narrow  neck"  as 
applied  to  our  Lord's  human  consciousness.  The  expression  is 
human,  completely  human ;  but  that  which  is  expressed  is 
neither  human  alone  nor  Divine  alone  ;  but  Divine  and  human 
fused  or  blended.     While  the  Divine  and  the  unconscious  are 


488  THE    PERSON    OF   JESUS    CHRIST 

not  equated,  it  is  held  that  the  unconscious  is  the  sphere  within 
which  Divine  and  human  coalesce.  Their  mutual  influence 
takes  eff'ect  below  the  dividing-line  at  which  the  resultant  con- 
sciousness emerges. 

I  can  only  summarise  the  objections  to  which  this  striking 
argument  seems  to  be  exposed.  With  Dr.  Sanday's  unreserved 
declarations  as  to  the  unity  and  consistency  of  Jesus'  life,  and 
his  acceptance  of  the  position  that  "there  is  no  possible  or 
desirable  division  between  what  is  human  in  Him  and  what  is 
Divine,"  there  will,  I  imagine,  be  general  sympathy.  But  we 
must  ask  whether  his  special  solution  of  the  problem  can  be 
permanently  maintained. 

(a)  Is  the  superiority  of  the  unconscious  really  tenable  1 
Subliminal  process  is  no  doubt  an  indispensable  concomitant  of 
all  mental  life;  psychology  would,  however,  class  it  not  as  the 
higher  form,  but  as  a  subordinate  and  ancillary  condition  of  the 
fully  conscious.  Its  content  and  quality  are  alike  derived  from 
consciousness;  in  Professor  Stout's  words,  "it  is  an  organised 
system  of  conditions  which  have  been  formed  in  and  through 
bygone  conscious  experience."  From  the  ethical  point  of  view 
the  difficulty  is  still  graver,  and  I  do  not  find  it  mitigated  by 
what  has  been  nrged  as  to  the  "  live "  and  active  character  of 
the  contents  of  subliminal  mind,  or  its  independently  receptive 
contact  with  the  universe.  Does  the  subconscious  have  moral 
qualities  of  any  kind  1  It  yields  not  merely  the  inspirations  of 
genius  or  heroism,  but  the  disordered  and  incoherent  absurdities 
of  dreams ;  is  a  vague  and  dubious  magnitude  of  this  sort 
calculated  to  help  us  to  interpret  Jesus  ?  Why  should  we  take 
this  half-lit  region  of  psychic  life,  regarding  which  we  can  only 
speak  hypothetically  or  at  second-hand — since  it  cannot  of  course 
be  known  directly — and  say  that  it  ofi'ers  a  truer  and  more  worthy 
dwelling-place  or  medium  of  Godhead  than  is  provided  by  the 
full  intensity  of  consciousness?  I  question  whether  Christian 
mysticism  is  really  on  Dr.  Sanday's  side.  The  mystics  appear 
to  refer  the  soul's  participation  in  God  to  His  presence  in  their 
consciousness,  their  knowledge,  will,  and  feeling— at  least  pre- 
dominantly. Lastly,  the  subconscious  has  affinities  rather  with 
sleep,  infant  life,  and  animal  instinct ;  which  suggests  that  it  is 
of  a  character  too  humble  and  inarticulate  for  Dr.  Sanday's 
greater  purpose. 

(b)  Inferentially   the    new   theory    involves  a  conception  of 


DR.    SANDAY  S    PYSCHOLOGICAL   THEORY         489 

deity  as  uiikiioAvable.  God  is  not  conscious  mind  kiiuwn  to  or 
in  conscience  and  reason,  but  touches  us  rather  beneath  the  line 
of  clear  thought  and  moral  volition.  Yet  Christians  dcjfine  Him 
as  love  and  holiness  existing  in  the  form  of  Absolute  Personality  ; 
love  conscious,  ethical,  rational.  But  this  is  something  we 
simply  cannot  put  in  terms  of  the  unconscious.  We  know  what 
is  meant  by  saying  that  the  love  which  looked  out  of  Christ's 
eyes,  touching  men's  lives  and  making  all  things  new  for  them, 
was  literally  the  love  of  God  Himself.  But  how  shall  we  speak 
of  a  Holy  Love  whose  fit  home  is  in  the  subliminal  1  The  only 
epithets  rightly  applied  to  deity  have  hitherto  been  drawn  from 
the  sphere  of  conscious  will  and  reason ;  if  they  are  vetoed,  as 
the  new  theory  appears  to  veto  them,  God  becomes  indescribable 
and  unknown.  Further,  the  facts  which  have  been  appealed  to 
all  through  the  ages  in  proof  that  in  Christ  deity  and  humanity 
were  combined,  are  those  of  His  spiritual  authority,  His  sinless- 
ness.  His  redeeming  power,  His  filial  consciousness,  and  the 
Hke.  Certainly  there  is  mystery  in  the  manifestation,  but  the 
mystery  is  in  ihese  forms  of  consciousness,  and  is,  I  feel,  in  no 
way  relieved  by  being  referred  to  an  inscrutable  non-conscious 
background. 

(c)  Does  the  new  hypothesis  really  evade  the  haunting 
dualism  of  tradition  ?  It  is  proposed  that  instead  of  a  vertical 
line  between  the  two  natures,  as  in  older  doctrine,  we  should 
draw  a  horizontal  line  between  the  upper  human  medium  and 
the  lower  deeps  where  deity  has  a  home.  Dr.  Sanday,  it  is  true, 
insists  that  the  interfusion  of  Divine  and  human  is  eff'ected  in 
the  region  of  the  subconscious,  so  that  it  is  in  a  subliminal  whole 
where  the  union  has  already  been  realised  that  the  resulting  full 
consciousness  arises.  But  this  in  no  way  alters  the  fact  that  the 
full  consciousness  in  question  is  merely  human,  so  that  to  reach 
the  Divine  in  Jesus  we  must  still  quit  the  human  sphere.  We 
still  argue  from  one  io  the  other,  passing  in  either  direction 
by  a  distinct  movement  of  transition ;  we  do  not  see  them 
identified  or  merged  in  living  oneness,  as  both  faith  and  the  ideal 
Christology  are  clear  we  must. 

In  a  later  pamphlet  {Personaliiy  in  Christ  and  in  Ourselves, 
1911)  Dr.  Sanday  concedes  that  he  may  have  made  the  boundary- 
line  between  conscious  and  subconscious  rather  too  sharp.  The 
action  and  reaction  between  the  two  spheres  is  mutual  and 
incessant.     Xor    does    he   wish,   as   he    explains,   to   treat   the 


490  THE    PERSON    OF   JESUS    CHRIST 

subliminal  as  per  se  superior  to  the  supraliminal.  But  if  this  be 
so,  the  question  is  whether  one  of  the  main  arguments  for  his 
theory  as  a  whole  has  not  vanished.  We  must  be  able  to 
predicate  of  the  subconscious  a  deeper  affinity  with  the  Divine  if 
it  is  to  rank  as  par  excellence  the  receptacle  for  indwelling  or 
incarnated  Godhead,  an  affinity  which  I  have  argued  cannot  be 
made  out.^ 

^  Cf.  with  the  above  two  full  and  su^rgestive  artides  by  Professor  Henri 
Bois  in  the  Montauban  Revue  de  TlUologie  for  July  and  September  1911, 
wliioh  deal  at  considerable  length  with  Dr.  Sanday's  theory  and  its  critics. 
Professor  Bois  agrees  with  Ur.  Sauday  in  holding  that  the  subconscious  is 
the  psychological  locus  of  the  indwelling  of  God  in  Jesus,  but  rejects  the 
orthodox  Trinitarian  background  of  the  new  hypothesis. 


CHAPTER   XL 

THE  SELF-REALISATION  OF  CHRIST. 

One  defect  in  traditional  Christology,  of  which  the  best 
modern  thought  is  sensible,  is  a  tendency  to  construe  our 
Lord's  person  in  rigid  and  quiescent  terms  which  are 
liostile  to  the  idea  of  development.  The  Cyrilline  theory, 
whatever  its  discretion  in  statement,  left  no  place  for 
growth  in  the  Incarnate.  He  is  represented  as  being 
complete  mit  einem  Schlage,  at  a  single  stroke.  The  whole 
significance  of  His  personality  is  given  by  fiat  from  the 
very  outset.  It  is  forgotten  that  a  static  theory  of  a 
dynamic  reality  must  prove  false,  and  that  ethically 
qualified  life  unfolding  within  time  is  subject  by  definition 
to  change  and  progress  through  which  it  attains  to  be 
explicitly  and  in  act  what  it  is  by  fundamental  constitu- 
tion. It  was  a  symptom  or  consequence  of  this  initial 
error  that  the  fact  of  the  historic  Jesus'  growth  in  power 
and  knowledge  came  to  be  totally  ignored,  or,  if  not 
ignored,  referred  exclusively  to  His  manhood.  Humanity, 
even  the  humanity  of  God,  it  was  conceded,  must  exhibit 
real  modification  and  increase  ;  hence  the  humanity  of  Jesus 
doubtless  possessed  these  vital  characteristics  of  a  dilating 
and  self-augmenting  life.  But  to  speak  of  Godhead 
as  patient  of  change  is  self-contradictory.  Deity  is 
insusceptible  of  growth   or  diminution. 

To-day,    however,   there    is    a    natural     reluctance   to 

LiTERATriiE — Dorner,  System  of  Christian  Doctrine,  1890  ;  Forsyth, 
Person  and  Place  of  Jesus  Christ,  1909;  Weston,  The  One  Christ,  1907; 
Orr,  Christian  View  of  God  and  the  World,  1893;  Edwards,  The  God- Man, 
1895  ;  Garvie,  Studies  in  the  Inner  Life  of  Jesus,  1907  ;  Beusow,  Die  Lehre 
von  der  Kenose,  1903. 

491 


492  THE    PERSON    OF    JESUS    CHRIST 

break  up  Christ's  single  person  into  the  two  unrelated 
halves  which  any  such  view  must  postulate.  His  life,  we 
are  sure,  is  a  uuity  both  in  being  and  doing ;  and  all  our 
efforts  to  show  how  it  is  one,  and  what  sort  of  one  it  is, 
presuppose  this  unity  as  apprehended  from  the  first  by  the 
Christian  consciousness.  If  growth  is  predicable  of  one 
aspect  of  the  whole,  it  is  predicable  of  the  whole  to  which 
that  aspect  belongs.  It  is  inconceivable  that  what  went 
on  in  Christ's  manhood  made  no  difference  in  His  total 
person.  Furthermore,  change  is  a  necessary  condition  of 
life  in  history,  in  which  finite  reality  comes  to  itself 
through  the  issues  of  free  and  motived  action.  In  par- 
ticular, every  reality  of  the  kind  called  "  ethical  "  not  only 
realises  but  wins  its  life  through  interaction  with  a  chang- 
ing environment  which  serves  to  educe  and  reveal  its 
latently  moral  character.  Life  for  every  moral  agent  lies 
open  in  the  direction  of  the  future ;  he  is  becoming  that 
which  he  has  not  been  and  is  not  yet.  He  lives  by 
moving ;  to  make  the  same  choice  for  ever  would  be  to 
make  no  choice  at  all  and  ipso  facto  lapse  from  the  moral 
plane.  If,  then,  our  Lord  belongs  to  concrete  history.  His 
person  cannot  be  a  scene  of  stagnation ;  and  the  activity 
and  movement  constitutive  of  it  is  no  mere  evanescent 
accident,  but  vital  to  His  individuality.  There  must  be  a 
sense  in  which  His  being  is  ever  approaching  completion. 
Finally,  the  maxim  that  development  in  Christ  is  excluded 
by  the  absolute  immutability  of  Godhead  is  one,  as  we 
have  seen,  to  be  accepted  only  with  great  reserve. 
Inferences  derived  from  the  abstract  conception  of  deity 
must  be  confronted,  in  this  field,  with  the  essential 
distinction  between  God  pa^  se,  in  His  transcendent  being, 
and  God  as  He  comes  forth  in  self-impartation  to  spirits 
immersed  in  space  and  time.  If  the  incarnation  be  a  fact, 
it  is  obviously  a  fact  involving  the  self-subjection  of  the 
Divine  life  to  ethical  laws  and  conditions  of  existence 
which  are  so  far  irrelevant  to  Godhead  as  such  and  apart 
from  the  incarnate  relationship.  The  conception  is 
difficult,  of  course;  but  the  difficulty  is  one  inherent  in 


MORAL    LIFE    A    SCENE    OF    GROWTH  493 

the  assumed  facts.  God  in  man  is  by  supposition  other- 
wise qualitied  than  God  as  absolute,  "Himself  unmoved, 
all  motion's  source " ;  and  one  deep-reaching  qualification, 
apart  from  which  there  could  be  no  true  human  life,  is 
liability  to  real  activity,  growth,  evolution  within  the 
time-series.  And  if,  to  leave  these  geueralities,  we 
contemplate  the  Christ  of  history,  first  at  the  outset  of  His 
career,  next  at  its  termination,  we  are  clearly  aware  that 
the  comparison  reveals  a  movement  between  these  points ; 
a  process  whereby  the  significance  of  His  personality  has 
been  enhanced.  At  the  end  it  includes  more  of  those 
qualities  in  virtue  of  which  He  is  definable  as  Redeemer. 
"  As  God  in  manhood,"  writes  Bishop  Weston,  "  as  God 
self-conscious  in  manhood,  He  is  not  at  birth  perfect  in 
the  sense  of  complete  attainment ;  but  only  in  the  popular 
sense  of  being  free  from  sin  and  from  the  lack  of  anything 
necessary  to  Him  at  the  stage  of  life  in  which  He  was."  ^ 
There  is  a  becoming,  and  it  yields  an  access  of  being. 

We  have  the  less  need  to  dwell  on  these  abstract 
principles,  because  stages  or  crises  in  Jesus'  life  can 
be  indicated  where,  as  in  veins  below  the  surface,  the  pulse 
and  flow  of  movement  is  discernible,  and  the  coalescence 
of  the  Divine  and  human  within  Him  can  be  viewed  as  a 
process.  To  take  only  three  instances :  His  baptism,  His 
death,  and  His  resurrection  cannot  have  passed  and  left  no 
mark.  The  result  must  have  been  to  deepen  the  involu- 
tion and  co-inherence  of  the  two  mobile  factors  of  His  life 
and  to  secure  their  more  perfect  mutual  irradiation.  His 
baptism  was  in  itself  a  token  of  a  faith  matured  through 
resistance  to  early  temptations ;  it  sealed  Him  as  One  who 
had  sustained  unimpaired  His  filial  relation  to  the  Father, 
and  in  the  long  effort  had  acquired  full  ability  and 
independence  of  moral  life.  And  by  sealing  it,  it  made 
this  moral  character    still    more    irrevocably    fixed.      But 

*  Op.  cit.  291.  It  is  noticeable  that  the  evangelists  do  not  place  Jesus 
vividly  before  us  till  He  has  reached  the  maturity  of  His  strength  ;  they 
do  not  dwell  on  His  childhood,  for  our  attitude  towards  a  little  child  is  not 
the  fitting  attitude  to  our  Redeemer. 


494  THE    PERSON    OF   JESUS    CHRIST 

this  decisive  act  of  self-identification  with  tlie  sinful  must 
have  been  inspired  more  by  perfect  faith  than  by  a  full 
perception  of  its  implications,  which  only  the  future  could 
disclose.  When  it  transpired  later  that  nothing  would 
avail  but  the  uttermost  sacrifice  of  death,  Jesus'  acceptance 
of  this  final  obligation,  in  a  series  of  experiences  interpret- 
able  at  their  height  by  the  transfiguration — when  love  to 
men  filled  His  expanding  soul  and  by  inward  act  He 
avowed  His  willingness  to  share  their  lot  to  the  uttermost 
— raised  Him  to  a  yet  sublimer  plane,  a  more  completely 
redemptive  fulness  and  glory  of  moral  being.  But  above 
all  He  fulfilled  His  person  through  His  death  and 
resurrection.  Who  can  fail  to  see  that  Christ  was  more 
Himself — more  fully  and  completely  all  that  is  denoted 
by  the  name  Christ — when  death  was  past,  than  when  as 
a  child  He  lay  in  Simeon's  arms  ?  ^  By  His  resurrection,  St. 
Paul  declares,  He  was  installed  as  Son  of  God  with  power. 
Thus  the  Eisen  Life  came  not  ex  abriipto,  or  from  without, 
but  at  the  point  when  the  life-content  of  Godhead  had 
taken  completely  realised  form  within  Him  and  become 
the  mighty  principle  of  an  exalted  and  redeeming  life 
in  the  Spirit.  Mediated  by  experiences  now  past,  and 
supremely  by  the  experience  of  the  cross,  the  identification 
of  self-imparting  Godhead  with  finite  human  forms  was  at 
last  perfected,  and  the  Divine  uoumenon,  if  we  may  call 
it  so,  become  wholly  one  with  the  human  phenomenon. 
And  this  plerosis,  or  development  and  culmination  of  the 
Eedeemer's  person,  is  an  event  or  fact  which  answers 
spiritually  to  the  great  Jccnosis  from  which  it  had  begun. 
The  two  are  moral  correlates.  On  the  privative  act  of 
renunciation,  lasting  on  in  moral  quality  throughout  the 
earthly  career,  there  follows  the  re-ascent  of  self-recovery. 
He  who  lost  His  life  for  our  sake  thereby  regained  it. 

It  may  help  to  make  this  general  conception  more 
luminous  if  we  recur  to  the  Christological  axiom  that  our 
Lord's  person  and  work  constitute  a  single  reality.  If  the 
work  is  dependent  on  the  person,  and  moves  through  it  to 

^  Cf.  Kiililer,  Anrjeivandte  Dogvien,  65. 


DEVELOPMENT    IN    JESUS     PERSONALITY  405 

achievement,  the  person  is  in  some  real  sense  dependent  on 
the  work,  fulfilled  by  its  mediation,  integrating  all  its  virtue. 
It  is  not  in  our  minds  merely  that  the  two  condition  each 
other,  but  objectively  and  in  themselves.  Now  the  work 
is  admittedly  a  process.  As  part  of  history  it  could  not  be 
given  en  bloc  ;  it  had  its  times,  its  order,  its  movement  from 
less  to  more.  Hence  real  growth  is  predicable  also  of 
Christ's  person ;  the  union  of  God  and  man  in  Him  was 
more  completely  actualised  at  death  than  at  birth,  when 
He  rose  than  when  He  died.  As  the  discharge  of  His 
vocation  proceeded,  His  personality — which  as  an  ethical 
constitution  could  not  be  tin  fait  accompli  from  the  outset — 
expanded  into  its  own  fulness.  What  He  did  flowed  from 
what  He  was,  but  also  He  was  in  a  real  measure  all  that 
He  did.  He  was  creating  Himself  continually.  In  each 
moment  of  His  present  there  was  a  constitutive  persistence 
of  His  past,  as  His  redeeming  soul  dilated  in  Divine 
capacity,  not  only  modifying  its  quality  but  also  increasing 
its  intensity.  Thus  the  cross  was  not  for  Him  eventually 
a  defeat ;  it  was  the  last  consummation  of  His  person. 

The  principle  touches  every  side  of  life.  There  is  the 
ever-increasing  degree  in  which  His  body  became  minis- 
trant  to  the  spirit ;  there  is  the  growing  moral  stability 
which  comes  from  duty  done,  from  new  responsibilities 
accepted.  There  is  advance  in  His  reasoning  thought,  in 
His  mental  fitness  to  be  the  medium  of  truth,  His  adjust- 
ment of  personal  relationships,  His  holy  aversion  to  sin 
mingled  with  the  knowledge  that  He  is  identified  with  the 
sinful.  His  awareness  of  supremacy  over  man  and  of  one- 
ness with  the  Father.  He  could  be  tempted,  as  God  can- 
not. The  creaturely  weakness  which  quivered  in  Gethse- 
mane  had  still  to  be  clothed  with  power.  All  this,  how- 
ever, it  is  impossible  to  abstract  from  His  person.  It  has 
no  reality  our  minds  can  apprehend  to  say  that  He 
matured  in  mind,  in  character,  in  self-consciousness,  but 
that  His  personality  or  Ego  remained  throughout  immut- 
ably behind  a  veil,  as  a  substratum  unaffected  by  the 
phenomena  of  change.      The  word  "  person  "  has  no  content 


496  THE    PERSON    OF   JESUS    CHRIST 

when  we  remove  moral  character,  religious  consciousness, 
and  the  mediatorial  function  which  both  subserve.     Wher- 
ever reality  exists  of  the  kind  we  call  "  personal,"  it  cannot 
be   described   adequately    either   by   reference   to   a   quite 
changeless  Ego  which  abides  untouched  beneath  the  shift- 
ing  mass   of   our  wliole   psychical   existence,  the   flux   of 
experience,  or   in   terms    exclusively  of   the    shifting   flux 
itself.      The  fact  is  a  combination  of  both.      The  concep- 
tions of  static  identity  with    which  our  study  of  person- 
ality usually  begins  have  to  be  laid  aside,  and  we  learn  to 
conceive  spiritual  being  rather  as  that  wliich  by  its  nature 
moves  from  potency  to  achievement.      The  concrete  fact, 
in   other  words,  presents  itself  as  a  moving  continuity,  a 
continuity  which  is  lived — the  core  of  it  persisting,  yet  the 
modification  of  change  not  less  real ;  while  neither  aspect, 
abstract  and  hypostatise  it  as  we  may,  exists  save  in  and 
through    the   other.      Indeed,    it    is   no   bad  figure   which 
symbolises  personality  by  a  melody,  in  which  each  note  is 
continuous  with   the   rest   and   exhibits  a  tone-colour  and 
value  dependent  on   the  whole,  the   melody  meanwhile  per- 
petually building  itself  up  in  successive  notes  which  in  turn 
subtly   reflect    the    entire    musical    conception.      However 
faulty  the  illustration,  it  serves  to  bring  out  the  fact  that 
the  anterior  stages  of  personal  life  pass,  by  a  dynamic  pro- 
gress, into  the  later  and  richer  stages,  and  that  if  we  are  to 
state  the  full  truth,  we  must  speak  not  only  of  a  continuity 
of  being  but  of  a  continuous  becoming.     It  is  no  defect  in 
finite  personality  that  it  should  have   this  character  ;  it  is 
simply  its  nature.     And  already  we  have  seen  reason  to 
contend  that  it  was  into  this  developmental  form  of  exist- 
ence that  Divine  love  and   life  passed,  when   Christ  was 
born  to  traverse  all  the  authentic  stages  of  human  life. 

Objections  to  this  view  may  be  raised  from  two  sides. 
It  may  fii'st  be  urged  that  the  notion  of  an  un perfected  Life 
which  still  is  perfect  cannot  be  maintained.  If  we  predicate 
change  and  progress  of  the  Incarnate,  not  as  man  only,  but 
in  His  one  Divine-human  personality,  is  not   this  to  assert 


OBJECTIONS    TO    THIS   VIEW  497 

defect  and  shortcoming?  If  it  be  so,  the  fault  lies  with 
our  human  speech.  "  Imperfect,"  as  meaning  "  uncom- 
pleted "  or  "  inadequately  realised,"  has  become  encrusted 
with  illegitimate  moral  associations  suggestive  of  sin  or  evil. 
But  any  given  stage  of  a  development  short  of  the  highest 
is  not  of  course  deficient  in  this  moral  sense.  "We  dis- 
tinguish the  seed  from  the  tree  as  "  imperfect "  only  if  we 
have  first  taken  the  tree  as  our  criterion  of  reality.  So 
regarded,  imperfection  is  but  a  name  for  finitude ;  on  the 
other  hand,  the  finite,  and  it  only,  is  capable  of  being  per- 
fected through  the  eventual  realisation  of  its  idea.  It  is 
of  course  this  gradual  and  ethically  mediated  attainment  of 
perfection  which  we  ascribe  to  Christ.  His  life  is  a 
process  which  runs  its  course  in  time,  and  moves  from  a 
basis  of  constitution  to  a  climax.  To  exist  humanly  is  to 
unfold  capacities  originally  present  in  mice ;  the  differential 
feature  of  Christ  is  the  unique  degree  of  capacity  posited 
in  the  fact  that  He  is  God's  Son  in  flesh.  "Whereas  in  any 
other  child  or  youth  there  exists  the  potency  only  of  a 
completed  Jinite  self-consciousness,  in  Christ  the  potency  is 
infinite. 

Secondly,  it  may  be  said  that  this  application  of  the 
category  of  growth  to  Christ  is  equivalent  to  the  assertion 
that  though  originally  merely  human.  He  became  Divine. 
How  can  we  think  the  life-content  of  Godhead  as  being 
gradually  conveyed  in  its  fulness  to  Jesus,  the  individual 
man,  in  proportion  to  His  receptivity,  without  transferring 
the  realities  of  incarnation  to  His  life  on  earth,  so  that 
incarnation  finally  appears  as  the  resultant  of  His  human 
career,  rather  than  its  antecedent  ground  ?  This  criticism 
is  probably  due  to  the  frequent  use  of  the  brief  but  inac- 
curate pln-ase  "  gradual  incarnation."  But  what  is  meant 
by  those  who  use  the  phrase  is  simply  to  call  attention 
to  the  ethically  mediated  development  or  self-fulfilment 
of  a  life  which  is,  by  original  constitution,  Divine-human. 
Such  development  they  hold  to  be  a  moral  necessity  of  the 
case,  since,  as  Dorner  puts  it  from  an  earlier  standpoint, 
"  the  two-sided  Unio  cannot  at  the  outset  exist  in  the 
32 


498  THE    PERSON    OF    JESUS    CHRIST 

sphere  of  knowledge  and  volition  proper,  which  presuppose 
self-consciousness ;  for  neither  human  will  nor  conscious- 
ness can  be  actually  existent  at  the  outset."  ^  This  effort 
to  construe  the  whole  in  ethical  terms,  which  can  never  be 
satisfied  by  the  juxtaposition  or  even  the  interpenetration 
of  two  disparate  substances,  leads  naturally  to  a  theory  of 
the  kind  now  described.  To  the  Divine  movement  of  self- 
impartation,  a  human  recipiency  in  Jesus  must  answer  at 
each  point,  the  content  more  and  more  adjusting  itself  to 
the  capacity  of  the  form. 

Our  case  then  is  this :  First,  it  is  never  to  be  for- 
gotten that  there  is  a  Christ  at  all  only  in  virtue  of  an 
unspeakable  Divine  sacrifice.  That  fixes  His  proper  plane  ; 
also  it  makes  possible  a  redeeming  Life  in  human  form. 
Secondly,  everywhere  in  the  moral  world,  and  so  for  Christ, 
it  is  a  law  that  we  have  and  inherit  only  that  which  we 
also  win  for  ourselves,  appropriating  the  initial  gift  by 
action,  will,  liberty.  Thus  we  can  believe  that  when  Jesus 
came  to  Himself  absolutely,  through  life,  death,  and  the  last 
victory,  it  was  as  fulfilling,  and  triumphantly  entering 
upon.  His  implicit  being.  The  gain  of  life  for  Him  was 
in  a  sense  regained.  It  was  progress  in  personal  unity  with 
Godhead,  not  progress  to  it  from  outside.  The  life  grew 
and  moved  onward  to  its  mighty  climax  ;  death  and  victory 
set  the  crown  upon  it  all ;  and  the  whole  vast  movement 
retains  its  moral  quality  because  it  came  to  pass  through 
an  unceasing  conflict  with  sin  and  death  and  tragedy,  sus- 
tained by  perfect  dependence  on  God  and  perfect  love  to 
man.  So  there  unfolded  in  Christ  that  which  had  been 
enfolded  within  Him  by  the  Eternal  Love,  to  be  restrained 
wholly  by  the  bounds  of  manhood.  Notwithstanding  the 
personal  identity  which  unites  the  Child  of  Nazareth  to 
the  risen  Lord,  this  newness  of  life-content,  this  dynamic 
advance  in  ripened  and  articulated  nature,  is  a  cardinal 
element  of  the  whole  fact. 

Thus  the  whole  personality  of  Christ,  as  it  has  been 
expressed,   "  is  not  something  given  at   the  start  by  the 

^  System  of  Christian  Doctrine,  iii.  335. 


BRIEF    RECAPITULATION  499 

existence  side  by  side  of  the  Divine  and  Ininiau  natures, 
but  something  achieved  by  His  hfe's  action."  ^  And  of 
this  self-fulfilment  the  presence  of  God  in  Jesus  is  the 
permanent  underlying  ground.  It  is  not  simply  that  God's 
care  specially  fostered  a  certain  child,  youth,  man.  Eather 
it  is  that  the  indwelling  God,  who  is  Love  and  Power,  so 
formed  and  irradiated  this  expanding  life  that  from  within 
it  became  the  perfected  personality  it  was  by  potency. 
As  instrumental  factors  of  this  growth  many  things  may 
be  specified — e.g.  inborn  disposition  and  the  influences  of 
ancestral  piety — but  the  distinctive  force  is  given  by  the 
personal  inhabitation  of  God.  There  came — the  order  we 
cannot  fix— the  knowledge  of  His  unshared  connection 
with  the  Father.  There  came  a  sense  of  personal 
Redeemership,  of  a  place  and  function  answering  to 
ancient  promises  of  a  Servant  of  the  Lord  who  should  save 
by  vicarious  pain.  There  came  the  discovery,  through 
action,  of  His  own  inherent  power  to  rescue  lost  men  from 
all  their  sorest  troubles,  from  the  load  of  sin  and  the 
destroying  powers  of  nature.  Everything  which  can  be 
truly  said  regarding  the  growth  of  His  Messianic  conscious- 
ness is  in  place  here.  Living  in  that  age  and  land.  He 
could  only  awake  through  certain  thought-forms,  coloured 
by  ancient  human  experience,  to  His  singular  position  in 
time  and  history.  But  the  power  resting  on  Him  as 
Messiah  He  enjoys  as  His  own  possession.  It  could  rest 
only  on  the  Son.  More  and  more  He  takes  possession  of 
it,  till  at  last,  on  the  immortal  side  of  death,  it  fills  Him 
in  absolute  and  final  measure. 

But  this  general  interpretation,  as  I  believe,  may  be 
surveyed  from  a  yet  wider  point  of  view,  even  if  in  candour 
we  have  to  admit  that  a  problem  is  far  from  completely 
soluble  which  contains,  and  is  created  by,  two  imperfectly 
known  factors.^ 

'  J.  K.  Mozley,  %d  supra. 

^  On   what   follows   cf.    Kiihler,     Wisscnschaft   der  ehristliclieii   Lehrt?, 
325-56. 


500  THE    PERSON    OF    JESUS    CHRIST 

The  unification  of  Divine  and  human  life  in  Christ 
may  be  regarded  as  the  focus  and  meeting-point  of  two 
great  spiritual  movements  of  an  essentially  personal 
character.  From  above  comes  the  creative  initiating 
movement  of  God  towards  man,  directed  by  the  saving 
purposes  of  Holy  Love.  From  beneath  comes  the  yearning 
movement  of  man  toward  God,  in  faith  and  love  and  hope. 
These  two  personal  currents — of  salvation  held  forth  and 
communion  longed  for — ^join  and  interpenetrate  in  the  one 
person,  Jesus  Christ,  in  a  fashion  completely  concrete, 
historical,  apprehensible.  In  this  confluent  unification, 
which  does  not  cease  to  be  progressive  because  its  locus  has 
now  come  to  be  once  for  all  within  His  single  personality, 
is  given  the  specific  and  final  expression  of  an  active 
relationship  of  God  to  the  world  posited  with  its  very 
existence  as  His  creation — rooted,  therefore,  in  His  eternal 
being.  For  Him  redemption  is  re-creation  ;  in  it  creation 
comes  to  its  final  goal.  The  writer  who  first  named 
Christ  "  the  Word "  saw  Him  as  the  supreme  expres- 
sion of  this  Divine  purpose  for  the  world,  so  that  all 
He  utters  by  life  and  passion  rests  on  and  discloses 
some  aspect  of  the  Eternal  Life  as  its  ever-present 
background. 

In  all  His  relations  to  the  finite,  then,  God  appears  in 
this  specific  light,  this  attitude  of  redemptive  will.  His 
presence  in  Jesus  consummates  the  plan.  It  is  He  who 
calls  the  Divine-human  person  into  history  ;  it  is  He  who 
sustains  and  perfects  Him  by  a  real  indwelling  which  acts 
and  re-acts  upon  a  true  human  experience.  In  Christ, 
that  is,  the  personal  redeeming  distinction  or  aspect  in 
God  through  which  He  goes  forth  into  the  world,  to  save 
by  truth  and  grace,  takes  historical  form  in  the  conditions 
of  finite  life.  The  Highest  becomes  a  means  to  man's 
chief  end.  Eecent  attempts  to  conceive  of  God  as 
Purpose,  rather  than  as  Infinite  Thing  or  Quantity,  are 
again  raising  our  minds  to  the  thought  of  Him  as  ever 
eno-iiged  with  and  on  finite  souls,  moving  toward  them, 
energising  within   them,  essentially    directive,  actual,  and 


INCARNATION    AS    A    DIVINE    CLIMAX  501 

active.^  But  long  before  the  Gospel  had  set  this  forth  as 
the  "  far-off,  Divhie  event  to  which  the  whole  creation 
moves."  And  its  whole  centralised  meaning  and  power  is 
gathered  up  iu  Jesus.  He  is  "  the  Incarnation,  the  Fulfil- 
ment, the  expression  in  conditiuns  of  time  and  space,  of 
that  Intending  Will  which  is  coming  to  itself  in  the 
universe  of  human  souls."  ^  There  is  no  longer  any 
question  of  a  quiescent  Divine  substance  planted  in  bare 
mechanical  juxtaposition  with  impersonal  manhood ;  in 
Jesus'  soul,  rather,  is  given  the  spiritual  life-content  of 
God,  the  outgoing  of  His  infinite  redeeming  Self  into  the 
experience  of  a  growing  finite  spirit. 

Further,  on  the  human  side  the  progressive  and  irre- 
versible unification  in  Christ  of  life  Divine  and  human 
was  from  the  first  conditioned  by  a  unique  basis  of  human 
personality,  the  ground  of  the  future  complete  unity.  The 
unity,  as  a  fact  lived  out  in  time,  was  mediated  by  the 
gradual  voluntary  appropriation,  on  Jesus'  side,  of  the 
Divine  fulness  of  love,  truth,  holiness,  power.  In  virtue 
of  this  appropriation,  through  the  instrumentality  of  an 
obedience  which  never  faltered,  the  human  life  of  Jesus 
became  the  absolute  organ  of  the  Father's  self-bestowal. 
The  impartation  of  God  is  focalised  in  a  decisive  spiritual 
personality. 

Thus  on  both  sides,  the  originative  equally  with  the 
receptive,  real  conditions  can  be  found  for  that  personal 
life-unity  which  was  to  be  accomplished  through  the 
experiences  of  Jesus.  In  God  all  things  begin  from  His 
eternal  purpose  to  make  Himself,  in  His  Son,  the  means  to 
the  chief  end  of  man ;  in  Jesus  is  posited  a  uniquely 
qualified  life,  in  special  relations  to  the  Father,  and  free 
like  no  other  in  history  from  the  taint  or  disability  of  sin. 
These  two,  meeting  and  permeating  in  ways  which  the 
kenosis  had  made  possible,  issue  finally  in  Godhead 
perfectly  mediated  into  oneness  with  manhood.  The  basis 
and  guarantee   of   that  result    are  given  ab  initio ;  what 

^  Cf.  W.  Temple,  The  Nature  of  Personality  (1911). 

•  Hutton,  Authority  and  Person  of  our  Lord,  9.  ^ 


502  THE    PERSO^f    OF    JESUS    CHRIST 

cannot  be  given,  so  long  as  the  process  remains  moral,  is 
the  last  consummate  form.  The  life  of  Jesus,  far  from 
being  episodic  or  accidental  in  the  highest  point  of  view, 
was  constitutive  of  the  person  who  emerged  from  it.  lu 
the  w^ords  of  Dr.  Forsyth,  whose  exposition  of  this  general 
view  I  have  found  deeply  suggestive :  "  In  Christ  we  have 
two  tilings,  the  two  grand  actions  of  spiritual  being,  in 
final  peace  and  eternal  power.  We  have  the  whole 
perfect  action  of  Godhead  concentrated  through  one  factor 
or  hypostasis  within  it  and  directed  manward  both  to 
create  and  redeem ;  and  we  have  also  the  growing  moral 
appropriation  by  man's  soul  moving  Godward  of  that 
action  as  its  own,  as  its  initial  Divine  nature  and  content. 
.  .  .  As  His  personal  history  enlarged  and  ripened  by 
every  experience,  and  as  He  was  always  found  equal  to 
each  moral  crisis,  the  latent  Godhead  became  more  and 
more  mighty  as  His  life's  interior,  and  asserted  itself  with 
the  more  power  as  the  personality  grew  in  depth  and  scope. 
Every  step  He  victoriously  took  into  the  dark  and  hostile 
land  was  an  ascending  movement  also  of  the  Godhead 
which  was  His  base."  ^ 

Hence  we  may  regard  the  union  alternately  and 
equally  from  two  points  of  view,  each  of  which  is  defined 
by  the  other.  As  the  Father's  gift,  in  a  purpose  infallibly 
sure  of  execution,  it  is  Divinely  real  from  the  outset  and 
sub  specie  aeternitatis.  But  also  it  is  humanly  actualised 
in  time ;  it  comes  to  fruition  in  One  who  "  passes  from  a 
destiny  to  a  perfection  through  a  career."  What  we  see 
during  the  earthly  life  is  the  aspect  of  creaturely  un- 
perfectedness,  becoming  perfect  "  in  short  measures " ;  at 
the  resurrection  it  is  made  clear  how  much  had  always 
been  latent  in  this  Life  by  very  origin,  and  how  eventually, 
and,  to  the  insight  of  faith,  quite  fully  and  irrevocably,  the 
active  and  redeeming  life  of  God  is  now  become  the  vital 
content  of  humanity.  If  this  be  scouted  as  implying  an 
antinomy,  I  should  not  be  careful  to  deny  it,  nor  do  I 
think  that  the  work  of  theology  can  be  done  without 
1  Op.  cit.  338,  349. 


ETERNITY    AND   TIME  503 

eucounteriug  antinonnes  at  every  point  where  we  touch 
the  relations  of  eternity  and  time.  At  all  events,  this 
very  difficulty  meets  us  s<]uarely  as  soon  as  we  try  to 
think  out  the  meaning  of  Christian  redemption.  Eedemp- 
tion,  as  a  concrete  fact,  insists  in  being  contemplated  in 
just  these  two  ways.  It  is  the  outcome  of  eternal  love,  in 
whose  designs  there  can  be  no  breakdown ;  but  also,  as  we 
know  it,  it  is  a  temporal  experience,  successive,  continuous, 
expectant.  It  is,  yet  is  to  be.  Moreover,  from  the 
standpoint  of  theory  it  will  always  be  impossible  to  inter- 
pret the  receptivity  in  time  of  the  believing  soul  as  any- 
thing but  the  rival  of  the  eternal  grace  which  saves ;  in 
experience,  on  the  other  hand,  grace  fulfils  itself  in  volition, 
and  we  find  it  liberty  to  yield  to  God.  Thus  religion  itself 
is  unintelligible  if  once  we  define  eternity  and  time  as 
sheerly  disparate  or  mutually  exclusive,  or  assume  that  our 
nature  is  impervious  to  God.  And  this  Christian  experi- 
ence of  being  saved  is  positive  evidence,  given  in  immediate 
consciousness,  that  the  union  of  God  and  man  is  a  reality, 
achieved  in  regenerate  men,  however  faintly,  and  that  as  a 
reality  it  is  subject  to  conditions  of  growth  in  time. 

If  then  w^e  see  clearly  that  God  and  man  are  not 
definable  as  opposites,  and  that  time  is  susceptible  of 
eternity,  it  will  not  seem  incredible  that  there  should  have 
existed  in  Christ,  under  conditions  never  again  repeated,  a 
gradual  coalescence  of  life  Divine  and  human.  It  may  be 
this  is  one  reason  why  the  New  Testament  does  not 
hesitate  to  summon  the  Christian  to  share  the  very 
experience  of  Jesus — to  be  baptized  with  His  baptism,  to 
die  His  death,  to  live  with  Him  the  resurrection  hfe. 
Divine  though  He  be,  it  is  not  impossible  that  we  should 
be  one  with  Him.  Such  oneness  is  indeed  the  final  end 
of  His  mission,  and  the  nature  of  the  real,  always,  is  homo- 
geneous with  its  end.  Christ,  in  other  words,  was  God 
incarnate  in  such  modes  that — in  spite  of  the  difference 
between  Saviour  and  saved — we  may  follow  Him  on  an 
ascending  journey,  and  lay  hold  on  a  redeeming  life  w^hich 
He  has  made  real,  near,  and  sure  to  us  by  translating  it 


504  THE    PERSON    OF    JESUS    CHRIST 

into  the  progressively  appropriated  content  of  His  own 
soul.  It  is  fact  humanly  given  in  Him,  His  by  personal 
assimilation  and  ownership,  that  it  may  be  saving  fact 
received  by  man.  First  He  lived  the  grace  He  was,  finally 
He  installed  it  in  our  world  by  death,  and  entered  on 
universally  redemptive  sway.  Bub  the  fount  and  origin 
of  the  whole  was  the  vast  pre-temporal  transcendent  act 
of  self-abnegation  on  the  part  of  God. 

It  will  be  agreed  that  if  the  self-limitation  and  the  self- 
fulfilment  of  God  in  Christ,  with  which  this  chapter  and  the 
last  have  been  concerned,  are  real  and  credible,  they  are  also 
morally  correlative.  The  juxtaposition  is  not  accidental,  or 
due  to  a  mere  craving  for  logical  symmetry.  Each  answers 
to  the  other  by  an  ethical  necessity.  The  manifested  Divine 
fulness  which  faith  beholds  in  the  exalted  Lord,  inconceiv- 
able though  it  be  in  one  who  grows  on  the  soil  of  human 
nature,  as  merely  human,  is  intelligibly  continuous  with  the 
life  prior  to  resurrection,  and  fitly  crowns  it.  "Worthy  is 
the  Lamb  that  was  slain  to  receive  power  and  glory  and 
blessing."  Thus  what  He  rose  to  requires  that  what  He 
rose  from — the  frailty  and  the  cross — should  in  turn  have 
been  the  self-limiting  of  an  absolute  Life  and  Love,  of  a 
glory  which  could  be  resigned  because  it  could  also  be 
resumed.  This  on  one  side.  On  the  other,  the  moral  glory 
of  the  kenosis  points  to  the  almighty  consummation  of 
the  plerosis  or  re-ascent.  God  in  His  transcendence  is  not 
definable  as  moral  character  aiinply;  there  is  a  mode  of 
being  answering  to  the  Holy  Love  which  He  is ;  and  this 
Godhead  of  manifestation,  unrestrained  by  phenomenal  con- 
ditions, is  visible  in  Christ  as  risen.  Here,  at  the  core  of 
reality,  the  world  of  fact  and  the  world  of  value  inter- 
penetrate. Once  the  Divine  mode  of  self-revelation  in 
historic  life  had  ceased,  the  limitations  of  earth  and  nature 
dropped  away  ;  and  Christ  entered,  by  a  transition  of  which 
we  can  see  the  moral  fitness,  into  possession  of  all  power  in 
heaven  and  in  earth.  It  is  this  conception  which  the  New 
Testament  sets  forth  under  the  guise  of  a  reward  bestowed 


DESCENT    AND    ASCENT    COURELATIVE  505 

on  Christ  for  His  obedience — "  tlie  Name  which  is  above 
every  name."  We  are  led  to  think  of  Him  as  somehow 
greater  for  having  lived.  Finally,  it  is  perhnps  not  im- 
possible to  mark  the  traces  of  these  two  corresponding 
moments  or  movements  in  our  Lord's  person.  His  being  is  as 
it  were  the  theatre  or  locus  in  which  the  mauwaid  movement 
of  God,  characterised  by  redemptive  self-limitation,  blends 
with  the  Godward  movements  of  man  in  obedient  faith  and 
hope  and  love.  The  sustained  approach  of  the  Deus  humilis 
finds  its  essential  counterpart  in  that  rising  perfection,  that 
rekeLwa-t'i,  as  it  is  described  in  Hebrews,  which  He  acquired 
as  He  successively  seized  the  occasions  which  His  vocation 
as  Saviour  placed  before  Him.  What  we  behold  is  a 
personality  creating  its  own  form  by  a  series  of  acts,  of 
surmounted  moral  crises,  of  renunciations  conceived  and 
accomplished  duly  ;  the  enlarging  life  thus  oifering  an  ever 
more  adequate  organ  and  medium  of  self-revealing  Godhead. 
As  He  stooped  to  save.  He  grew  in  the  stature  of  Divine 
humanity. 

Apart  from  this  strain  or  element  of  Divine-human 
self-realisation  in  Christ,  our  thought  of  Him  must  be 
always  incomplete.  Exclusive  emphasis  on  the  Divine  self- 
reduction  leaves  a  picture  lacking  in  the  glorious  majesty  of 
the  Eisen  Lord.  Along  witli  the  self-renunciation  goes  ever 
an  ascending  line  of  self-fulfilment  and  re-conquest,  mediated 
in  moral  ways,  and  the  two  movements  are  distinguishable 
in  the  total  experience  of  which  Christ  was  Subject.  Each 
shares  the  other's  moral  rhythm,  and  is  fused  or  merged 
with   it  in  spiritual  unity. 

Such  thoughts,  it  may  be  said,  are  extravagant  and 
metaphysical.  Even  if  we  believe  tliem,  can  we  actually 
think  them  ;  can  we  place  tlieui  before  our  mind  in  artic- 
ulate and  lucid  form  ?  This  notion  of  a  Divine  kenosis, 
restraining  God  by  His  own  act  to  human  measures,  still 
more  perhaps  this  companion  idea  of  a  plerosis  or  self- 
acquisition,  whereby  the  synthesis  of  God  and  man  in 
Christ,    though    given    in    potency,    is    also    progressively 


506  THE    PERSON    OF    JESUS    CHRIST 

actualised — can  they  be  handled  or  even  lield  by  reason  1 
They  seem  rich  and  imposing,  as  conceptions  ;  may  they  not 
on  examination  prove  bankrupt,  their  fancied  wealth  turned 
in  a  moment,  like  the  fairies'  gifts,  to  withered  leaves  ?  I 
am  far  from  seeking  to  minimise  the  objections  which  may 
be  raised  on  behalf  both  of  tradition  and  of  liberal  theology. 
It  is  noticeable,  indeed,  that  in  certain  classical  treatises 
on  Christology  the  two  main  principles  set  forth  in  this 
chapter  and  the  last  are  viewed  as  essentially  incongruous 
and  antagonistic,  not,  as  I  have  argued,  mutually  correlative. 
Nevertheless,  I  cannot  avoid  the  conviction  that  it  is  in 
this  direction,  and  no  other,  that  we  are  led  by  the  facts 
alike  of  the  New  Testament  record  and  of  experience ;  and 
that  these  facts  are  such  as  make  it  a  natural  task  for  the 
Christologian  to  discover,  apprehend,  and  make  patent,  first 
to  himself  and  then  to  the  Christian  mind,  the  harmonious 
structure  of  some  general  theory  of  this  kind  ;  to  do  this  at 
least  in  its  main  outlines  and  dominating  principles. 

As  for  the  charge  of  inconceivability,  it  is  of  course 
peculiarly  hard  to  meet.  Yet  even  here,  the  main  ideas  of 
which  these  chapters  have  been  so  faltering  and  imperfect 
an  exposition  may  perhaps  challenge  comparison,  as  regards 
mere  capability  of  being  thought,  with  the  constructions  of 
recent  speculative  philosophy,  be  it  Hegelian,  Bergsonian, 
or  materialistic.  The  conception  of  Godhead  self-renounced 
and  self-fulfilled  in  Christ  is  surely  child's  play  in  contrast 
to  the  marvels  of  the  absolute  dialectic,  of  the  intuitive 
method,  or  of  naturalistic  evolution  as  interpreted  in  terms 
of  matter.  Whereas  the  Christologian  has  at  least  this 
advantage,  that  the  mystery  he  reports  is  a  mystery  of 
grace.  Holy  love  is  his  last  criterion  of  reality.  The 
greatness,  the  mercy,  the  glorious  power  of  Jesus  Christ, 
who  ransomed  us  with  His  blood,  and  who,  after  all 
creatures  have  received  of  Him,  is  still  as  endless  as  in  the 
beginning — these  are  facts  which  have  conveyed  to  the 
human  mind  a  totally  new  impression  of  what  God  is,  and 
of  the  lengths  His  love  will  go  to  redeem  the  world.  He 
who  has  stood  by  this  ocean  of  Divine  mercy,  as  it  stretches 


THE    MYSTERY    OF    GRACE  507 

from  his  feet  to  incomprehensible  distances,  will  not  too 
much  complain  that  our  estimate  of  Christ  should  thus 
bring  us,  ere  we  are  aware,  to  the  verge  of  silence.  Still, 
if  we  are  to  think  of  Him  at  all,  and  to  think  consistently, 
there  are  certain  ideas  in  which  we  are  obliged  to  throw 
out  our  minds  at  the  tremendous  fact.  One  such  idea  is 
surely  this,  that  if  personal  Godhead  enters  history,  it  must 
be  in  virtue  of  its  own  omnipotent  self-reduction ;  another, 
that  in  the  historic  Christ — living,  dying,  risen — there  is 
found  a  deepening  and  culminating  synthesis,  wuthin  a 
single  integrate  life,  of  the  Divine  and  human  factors  to 
which  faith  bears  equal  witness. 


CHAPTER   XTI. 

CHRIST  AND  THE  DIVINE  TRIUNITY, 

Christianity,  as  heir  of  the  Old  Testament,  is  a  form 
of  ethical  monotheism  which  yet  has  learned  to  conceive 
God  in  a  new  way.  Naturally  the  experience  of  redemption 
through  Christ  was  felt  from  the  first  as  reacting  on  the 
idea  of  God  who  alone  can  redeem.  It  was  felt  as  necessi- 
tating new  distinctions  in  a  Divine  nature  which  had  once 
been  regarded  as  bare  and  unfigured  simplicity.  Those 
who  look  up  to  an  omnipotent  Christ,  and  who  see  in  Him 
the  very  life  of  God  incorporate,  subsisting  from  before  all 
time,  are  obliged,  unless  they  resolve  not  to  think,  to 
adjust  this  conviction  to  the  basal  and  commanding  fact  of 
the  Divine  unity. 

But  the  operation  of  the  Spirit  is  as  characteristic  an 
element  of  Christianity  as  the  incarnation.  If,  in  virtue  of 
Jesus,  faith  is  rooted  in  the  actualities  of  the  past,  in 
virtue  of  the  Spirit  it  finds  its  perpetual  dynamic  in  the 
present.  The  principle  of  life  and  power  known  as  "  Holy 
Spirit "  is  no  one  casual  factor  in  perfect  religion  by  the 
side  of  others ;  it  is  that  to  which  everything  else  con- 
verges, and  apart  from  which  nothing  else — not  even  the 
revelation  of  Jesus — could  take  effect.  So  the  Father 
disclosed    in    the    Son    is    imparted    in    the   Spirit.      The 

Literature — Kirn,  article  "Trinitat"  RE.  xx.  ;  D'Arcy,  article 
"Trinity"  in  DCO.  1908;  Schleiermacher,  SdmmtUche  Werke,  i.  2,  1836; 
Illingworth,  Doctrine  of  the  Trinity,  1909 ;  Shedd,  Dogmatic  Theology, 
1889;  Fairbairn,  Christ  in  Modern  Theology,  1893;  Orr,  Christian  View  of 
God  and  the  World,  1893  ;  Rothe,  Dogmatik,  1870  ;  Hutton,  Theological 
Exsays^,  1888  ;  Druinmond,  Studies  in  Christian  Doctrine,  1908  ;  Arm- 
strong, The  Trinity  and  the  Incarnation,  1904  ;  Martineau,  Essays,  Reviews, 
and  Addresses,  II.  ;  Adams  Brown,  The  Trinity  and  Modern  Thought,  1906. 

50S 


THE    NEW    TESTAMENT    EXPERIENCE  509 

presence  of  the  Spiiit  comes  but  as  a  higher  mode  of 
Christ's  transcendent  influence,  the  climax  of  His  work. 
"  Through  Him  we  have  access  by  one  Spirit  unto  the 
Father  "  Ms  a  great  comprehensive  Pauline  word ;  and  in 
such  a  verse  the  experience  out  of  which  flowed  the  New 
Testament  faith  in  a  Triune  God  grows  transparent.  It 
is  the  experience  of  a  differentiated  yet  single  Divine 
causality  in  redemption.  If  then  the  Spirit  belongs  to  the 
sphere  of  the  Divine,  not  of  the  human  even  as  redeemed, 
room  must  be  made  for  it  also  witliin  the  believing  thought 
of  God.  Its  omission  leaves  that  thought  incomplete. 
We  speak  in  the  sense  of  the  New  Testament,  therefore, 
when  we  say  that  "  the  Father,  the  Son,  and  the  Spirit  in 
their  unity  constitute  the  God  whom  we  know  as  the  God 
of  our  salvation."  ^ 

The  doctrine  of  the  Triunity  found  in  Scripture,  how- 
ever, is  naive  and  experimental.  There  is  nothing  of 
reflection  or  design  about  it,  nothing  a  'priori,  nothing  that 
consists  in  or  comes  out  of  the  manipulation  of  abstract 
ideas.  It  is  due  to  an  irresistible  induction  as  objective  in 
its  own  way  as  that  which  established  spectrum  analysis. 
If  God  is  in  Christ,  not  figuratively  but  in  reality,  and  if 
the  Spirit  gives  a  renewing  Divine  life,  these  central  facts 
must  somehow  be  gathered  into  a  unitary  conception  of 
Godhead.  The  intuition,  then,  that  God  is  triune  is  born 
of  experience ;  this  is  the  dh'ection  in  which  the  Christian 
mind  is  spontaneously  led :  but  there  is  no  need  to  infer 
that  a  concept  thus  experimentally  generated  may  not  also 
have  immense  philosophic  value.  On  the  contrary,  it  may 
well  prove,  as  Bagehot  held,  "  the  best  account  which 
human  reason  could  render  of  the  mystery  of  the  self- 
existent  mind."  "What  does  follow  from  the  unspeculative 
thought  of  the  Xew  Testament  is  that  we  must  not  force 
upon  it  the  distinctions  of  later  times.  Tliese  distinctions 
soon  became  rigid  ;  apostolic  language  was  alive  and  fluid. 
Thus  2  Corinthians,  which  opens  with  a  double  salutation 
in  the  name  of  "  God  our  Father  and  tlie  Lord  Jesus 
lEph  218.  SDennej,  DCO.  i,  744. 


510  THE   PERSON    OF   JESUS    CHRIST 

Christ,"  ends  with  a  triple  benediction  invoking  "  the 
grace  of  the  Lord  Jesus  Christ,  and  the  love  of  God,  and 
the  communion  of  the  Holy  Spirit."  Yet  the  God  of  whom 
in  each  case  St.  Paul  was  tliinkiug  is  the  same,  and  his 
variant  phrases  cover  exactly  the  same  ground.  When  the 
bipartite  is  replaced  by  the  tripartite  formula,  no  change  in 
denotation  is  intended ;  except  for  the  fellowship  of  the 
Spirit,  the  grace  of  Christ  and  the  love  of  God  would  not 
be  ours.  No  fourth  name  is  ever  added  to  the  sacred  triad, 
and  Harnack  is  much  less  convincing  than  usual  when  he 
argues  that  at  one  point  it  was  something  like  an  even 
chance  that  "  the  Church  "  might  have  been  given  the  place 
in  the  formula  now  occupied  by  the  Spirit.^  The  fact  is 
that  the  Spirit  was  unquestioned  from  the  first,  the  epithet 
"  holy  "  marking  it  off  from  spirit  in  general  as  exclusively 
and  specifically  Divine. 

Spirit  means  life  and  power,  the  saving  energy  of  God 
within  human  life ;  and  it  is  the  uniform  teaching  of  tlie 
New  Testament  that  Christ,  who  possessed  this  Spirit  in  its 
fulness,  has  mediated  it  to  all  believers.  Hence  to  call  the 
Spirit  impersonal  must  ultimately  be  meaningless  for  a 
religion  to  which  the  gracious  power  of  God  can  never  be 
a  mere  "  thing."  Could  the  love  of  God  be  shed  abroad  in 
our  hearts  by  the  non-personal  ?  Could  a  natural  force 
enable  men  to  confess  Jesus  as  Lord  ?  True,  a  mono- 
theistic New  Testament  has  nowhere  described  the  Spirit 
as  a  "  separate  personality  "  ;  it  is  indeed  more  than  (|ues- 
tionable  whether  such  a  general  abstract  idea  as  "person- 
ality "  had  then  attained  general  currency.  Yet  in  the 
last  resort  the  Spirit  of  God  nmst  be  as  personal  as  God 
Himself.  So  true  is  this,  that  it  is  only  by  interior  union 
with  the  personal  Spirit  that  our  proper  personality  is  con- 
summated. To  have  within  us,  as  the  soul's  life,  the  very 
Spirit  that  made  the  inmost  being  of  Jesus,  is  bestowed  by 
Jesus,  and  commends  Jesus  to  the  heart — this  is  to  be 
perfected  in  personal  being.  By  unity  with  such  Spirit 
man  first  is  fully  man. 

^  Constitution  and  Law  of  the  Church,  265-66. 


THE    SPIRIT    OF   JESUS  511 

We  cannot  too  much  ponder  the  fact  that  in  Chris- 
tianity the  Spirit  is  identical  with  the  Spirit  of  Jesus.  This 
alone  gives  the  idea  precision  and  reality.  For  St.  Paul,  a 
path-hreaker  in  this  field,  the  phenomena  of  the  Spirit,  as 
an  ethical  power,  drew  their  value  and  permanent  signifi- 
cance from  their  connection  with  the  personality  of  Jesus ; 
and  it  is  clear  that  so  long  as  the  Spirit  mediates  the 
historic  Lord  to  men,  distilling  the  Gospel  (as  it  were) 
through  His  life  and  death,  Christianity  can  never  sink 
into  impotent  sentimentalism,  but  is  secured  by  the  native 
strength  of  fact  against  the  pessimism  and  defective  moral 
inspiration  which  so  often  accompany  impersonal  views  of 
grace.  It  follows  that  in  the  sphere  of  practical  religion 
it  is  impossible  to  distinguish  between  the  Spirit  and  Christ 
in  the  heart.  Each  blends  vitally  with  the  other.  The 
Spirit  is  but  the  form  or  mode  of  the  Lord's  presence. 
What  is  given  in  the  Spirit  is  Christ  transcendent  and  un- 
limited ;  otherwise.  His  Godhead  would  be  a  phrase  and 
nothing  more.^ 

The  attempt  to  force  a  literal  harmony  on  the  un- 
theorised  Trinitarian  utterances  of,  say,  Eomans  8  or  St.  John 
14-16  is  certain  to  be  disastrous.  Thus  for  St.  John  it  is 
the  Father  who,  in  response  to  the  Son,  imparts  the  Spirit 
to  abide  with  the  disciples  for  ever.  St.  Paul,  simply  re- 
cording and  enforcing  what  were  to  him  facts  of  the 
spiritual  life,  can  teach  that  the  Father  is  Lord,  and  the 
Son  is  Lord,  and  the  Spirit  is  Lord ;  while  yet  for  his  real 
mind  there  are  evidently  not  three  Lords,  but  one  only.  It 
would  not  be  difficult,  using  barely  arithmetical  methods,  to 
elicit  from  such  passages  an  average  view  which  reduced 
the  Godhead  to  a  species  consisting  of  three  individuals, 
with  distinct  departmental  offices,  and  constituting  one 
God  only  as  collective  humanity  is  man.  This  might  be 
done,  obviously,  by  a  cold  insistence  on  the  antinomies  of 
the  letter.  Nevertheless,  the  Trinitarian  thought  of  the 
Church,  be  its  shortcomings  what  they  may,  has  been  one 
^  Cf.  Schaeder,  Theozentrische  Theologic,  Erster  Teil,  27,  144-45,  165-67. 


512  THE    PERSON    OF   JESUS    CHRIST 

sustained  effort  to  show  that  this,  as  an  interpretation,  ia 
wholly  false  and  mechanical,  and  that  minds  whose 
sympathy  and  insight  are  quickened  by  religious  faith  can 
attach  a  profoundly  real  sense  to  what  might  seem  only 
verbal  dexterities  in  the  sphere  of  the  ineffable.  All  for 
whom  the  doctrine  of  the  Trinity  has  any  positive  kind  of 
meaning  are  at  one  in  this  conviction.  They  are  clear 
that  a  view  of  God  must  be  attained  which  will  embrace 
vitally  the  Divine  person  of  Christ  and  the  not  less  Divine 
work  of  the  Spirit. 

Nor  is  this  all.  Up  to  a  certain  point,  all  Christians 
are  unanimous  as  to  the  content  of  the  required  doctrine. 
They  are  unanimous  in  holding  that  God  has  been  re- 
vealed in  a  threefold  way.  Eedemption  is  a  historical  fact, 
or  series  of  facts ;  and  in  that  history  there  has  been  a 
manifestation  of  Father,  Son,  and  Spirit.  The  Eternal  has 
been  disclosed  in  Jesus  Christ,  by  whom  He  reconciled 'the 
world ;  He  speaks  in  our  heart  still  by  a  spiritual  presence 
that  guides  to  the  truth  contained  in  Jesus.  This  is  a  re- 
deeming Gospel — it  proclaims  that  God  is  not  far  off, 
approachable  only  at  long  last  by  hard  thinking  or  ascetic 
sacrifice,  but  that  He  came  amongst  us  in  His  Son,  and 
still  dwells  in  our  souls  as  Giver  of  life.  Now  in  essence 
the  doctrine  of  the  Trinity  is  but  a  brief  confession  of  these 
facts ;  and  thus  far,  let  it  be  repeated,  all  believers  are 
agreed.  They  are  agreed  as  to  the  essential  religious  data 
which  doctrine  must  assert,  even  though  the  Christian  in- 
telligence which  asks  questions  may  decline  to  stop  short 
with  this  simple  assertion. 

At  this  point,  then,  there  occurs  a  divergence  between 
the  advocates  of  what  are  called  the  economic  and  the 
immanent  views  of  the  Divine  Triunity.  According  to 
the  economic  or  modal  view,  we  see  the  triune  God  in  the 
revelation  He  has  given,  and  in  that  vision  we  rest. 
Creation,  redemption,  renewal  are  the  stages  or  phases  of 
His  self-disclosure.  Why  go  further  ?  Why  pretend  to 
step  outside  experience,  or  use  language,  which  of  course 
cannot  be  verified,  as  to  the  Divine  nature  in  itself  ?     The 


THE    ECONOMIC    THEORY  513 

fact  of  Christ  is  ultimate ;  it  is  vain  to  get  behind  it  and 
try  to  see  its  conditions.  It  is  vain  to  hyposlatise  an 
element  in  Christ  whicli  never  had  discernihly  a  separate 
existence,  but  is  simply  our  mental  articulation  of  an 
individual  reality,  an  aspect  artificially  detached  by  our 
thought.  Enough  for  us  to  behold  God  in  history  and 
Christian  life,  and  to  confess  Him  as  known  within  that 
field. 

With  the  positive  half  of  this  theory  no  other  view  can 
have  any  quarrel.  It  is  true  that  Father,  Son,  and  Spirit 
are  relative,  properly,  to  the  historic  revelation.  The 
term  "  Son,"  for  instance,  unquestionably  points  in  the 
first  place  to  the  Jesus  of  the  Gospels,  not  to  the  Second 
Person  of  the  Trinity.^  If  theologians  have  given  it  an 
eternal  or  supramundane  reference,  the  extension  has  been 
secondary  and  inferential.  Not  only  so ;  its  economic 
form  was  that  in  which  the  doctrine  of  the  Trinity  first 
came  to  be  set  out  in  theory.  Tertullian's  doctrine  is  of 
this  kind.  His  consuming  interest  in  monotheism  led  him 
to  insist  with  all  his  powers  that  distinctions  affirmed  of 
Godhead  are  distinctions  within  a  fundamental  unity.  So 
he  teaches  "  a  Trinity  of  dispensation  or  of  function,  like 
the  assignment  of  parts  or  duties  in  a  household :  the 
work  of  the  Father  has  special  relation  to  the  creation, 
conservation,  and  government  of  the  universe ;  the  work 
of  the  Son  has  special  relation  to  the  redemption  of  man  ; 
and  the  work  of  the  Holy  Spirit  is  the  continuation  of 
this."  2  With  all  his  side-glances  at  speculation,  Tertullian 
has  not  forgotten  that  the  Trinitarian  idea  sprang  out  of 
history. 

History  alone,  then,  is  our  true  point  of  departure  ;  but 
when  men  call  a  halt  at  the  outer  boundary  of  histoiical 
experience  on  the  ground  that  to  transcend  fact  is  to 
speculate,  and  that  speculation  is  injurious  to  faith,  it 
must  be  answered  that  all  such  proscription  is  unavailing. 

^  Moberly,  Atonement  and  Personality,  181-99  ;  cf.  the  important  Note  B 
to  chnp.  viii.  of  the  same  woik. 

*  Sanilay,  Chridolugies  Ancient  and  Modern,  26. 

33 


514  THE    PERSON    OF   JESUS    CHRIST 

In  the  first  place,  men  will  persist  in  thinking,  whatever 
notice-boards  may  be  set  up  by  the  well-meaning  theo- 
logical positivist  to  warn  the  trespasser  of  impending 
dangers.  It  is,  moreover,  illegitimate  to  insist  on  re- 
stricting the  Christian  mind  to  the  supremely  practical 
language  of  the  first  disciples,  whether  on  the  Trinity  or  any 
other  aspect  of  the  creed.  There  is  no  topic  on  which  the 
theologian  finds  his  material  in  the  New  Testament  ready 
and  merely  waiting  to  be  lifted.  It  is  not  thus  we  can 
deal  with  such  topics  as  the  Personality  of  God,  of  which 
no  theoretical  exposition  is  given  in  Scripture;  or  the 
Atonement,  of  which  passionate  apostolic  utterances  are 
not  fitted,  and  were  not  designed,  to  anticipate  the 
intellectual  rationale  demanded  by  each  new  age.  So  is  it 
with  the  Trinity.  Here  too  we  search  the  New  Testament 
in  vain  for  theories;  but  assuredly  we  encounter  great 
vital  data  which  it  is  our  duty  to  cross-examine  and 
explicate  and  synthesise  without  being  too  much  concerned 
by  the  recurrent  charge  of  having  strayed  into  the  domain 
of  metaphysic. 

In  addition  to  this,  it  is  plain  that  some  forms  of  the 
economic  view,  by  the  stress  they  lay  upon  its  negations, 
go  far  towards  cancelling  the  facts  with  which  all  theories 
must  start.  This  occurs,  for  example,  when  it  is  con- 
tended that  the  threefoldness  of  Divine  revelation  is  merely 
phenomenal.  God  appears  to  be  triune ;  He  is  not  really 
so.  Our  minds,  according  to  this  interpretation  of  the 
relativity  of  knowledge — which  is  here  introduced,  with  all 
its  ambiguous  paralogisms,  into  the  arcanum  of  faith — hide 
from  us  the  real  nature  of  things ;  we  know  objects  not  as 
they  are,  but  as  they  seem  to  us.  We  can  neither  tell 
precisely  what  is  the  amount  of  distortion  of  truth  indis- 
sociable  from  our  processes  of  cognition,  nor  can  we  rectify 
the  error.  Now  this  theory  of  knowledge,  which  is 
ultimately  agnostic,  leaves  phenomena  in  no  positive  or 
definable  relation  to  reality.  Applied  to  the  Christian 
thought  of  God,  it  means  that  for  us  God  is  Father,  Son, 
and   Spirit;  but  these  appellations  in  no  way  answer  to 


THE   TRINITY    AS    IMMANENT  515 

real  facts  which  qualify  His  essential  being.  But  if  iu 
general  we  reject  this  singular  view  of  the  self-defeating 
nature  of  cognition,  and  insist,  on  the  contrary,  that  our 
minds  in  very  deed  know  real  things,  and  that  phenomena 
are  a  true  index,  though  of  course  an  incomplete  one,  of 
concrete  being,  there  is  no  seriously  tenable  argument  for 
iimoring  this  principle  in  the  doctrinal  construction  of  the 
personal  life  of  God.  Our  believing  apprehension  of 
Father,  Son,  and  Spirit  is  in  contact  not  with  appearance 
only,  but  with  reality.  If  God  shines  through  Christ  to 
our  believing  apprehension,  then  by  way  of  this  historic 
medium  we  see  into  the  Divine  nature. 

For  the  rest,  it  may  be  convenient  to  proceed  by  way 
of  comment  upon,  or  reply  to,  the  best-known  objections 
to  the  conception  of  a  Trinity  immanent  iu  the  Divine 
life. 

(a)  It  may  be  urged  that  the  notion  of  an  immanent 
or  ontological  Trinity  is  an  attempt,  and  a  reprehensible 
one,  to  think  the  Godhead  as  God  is  in  Himself,  with 
abstraction  from  His  relation  to  the  world.  Now,  since 
God  is  actually  related  to  the  world,  we  are  the  subjects  of 
hallucination  (it  is  held)  if  we  imagine  that  by  leaving  that 
relation  out  of  sight  we  attain  to  a  more  profound  and  in- 
ward knowledge  of  His  being.  For  out  of  that  relation  God 
is  seen  precisely  as  He  is  not,  either  in  Himself  or  otherwise. 
Nor  is  this  all.  Eeligion  surely  has  no  concern  with  a 
Divine  existence  which  by  definition  is  conceived  apart 
from  the  world  and  humanity.  In  the  New  Testament 
everything  said  about  God  has  a  direct  bearing  on  man's 
redemption,  on  God's  final  purpose  with  His  children ;  and 
there  is  no  possible  stage  of  thought  at  which  we  are 
justified  in  ignoring  this  vital  reference. 

This  may  be  otherwise  put  by  saying  that  the  idea  of 
an  esseu  ial  Trinity  is  condemned  by  its  indifference  to 
history.  The  concept  of  the  Logos,  applied  early  in  the 
second  centuiy  to  denote  the  second  Person  in  the  Godhead, 
is  bound  up  incurably  with  this  grave  fault.     For  what 


516  THE   PERSON"    OF   JESUS    CHRIST 

it  primarily  indicates  is  not  the  revealing  significance  of 
Jesus — in  which  sense  it  is  quite  legitimate — but  cosmic 
reason,  either  as  a  principle  of  philosophic  thought  or  as 
a  rational  Power  permeating  the  universe.  Now  in  this 
sense  it  is  not  a  religious  notion  at  all.  The  interest  it 
satisfies  is  logical  or  cosmological.  Hence  the  problems  to 
which  it  relates  have  nothing  to  do  with  Jesus  the  Son  of 
God ;  they  pertain  to  the  purely  metaphysical  problem  of 
Infinite  and  finite,  of  the  One  and  the  many. 

The  burden  of  this  first  objection  is  then  that  the  idea 
of  an  immanent  Trinity  has  no  religious  meaning  or  im- 
portance. Now  this  is  a  point  of  view  which  it  is  not 
quite  easy  to  appreciate.  It  is  indeed  self-evident  if  the 
Godhead  of  Christ  be  first  denied,  but  otherwise  it  is 
as  obviously  erratic  and  short-sighted.  For  if  Christ 
be  Son  of  God  essentially,  religion  has  surely  a  real 
and  keen  interest  in  viewing  the  relation  of  Son  to 
Father  as  unbeginning.  By  an  irresistible  impulse  it 
will  "  eternalise  "  that  relation,  just  as  it  does  the  electing 
love  of  God  manifested  to  men  in  time.  For  the  Christian 
mind  it  means  everything,  as  was  proved  by  the  early 
controversies,  that  the  Sonship  of  Christ  is  no  mere 
temporal  creation,  but  the  expression  within  time  of  an 
eternal  fact.  Now  to  see  that  Christ  is  Son  from  before 
the  ages  is  to  see  also  that  God  is  Father  by  inherent 
,  nature,  that  this  is  His  essence.  It  is  to  plant  the 
Fatherhood  firmly  inside  the  Divine,  as  the  current 
Unitarian  form  can  never  do.  Concede  as  we  may  that 
to  lift  the  relationship  of  Father  and  Son  to  the  eternal 
plane  lends  no  new  content  to  our  knowledge  of  God's 
interior  life ;  that  the  Trinitarian  concept  is  empty  if 
sundered  from  the  roots  of  history  and  experience ;  that  we 
become  irresponsible  and  fantastic  so  soon  as  in  our 
thought  of  God  we  cast  loose  from  revelation  within  the 
world.  Yet  religion  has  assuredly  an  interest  in  noting 
that  the  meaning  of  Son  is  eternal  or  intrinsic,  not 
adventitious,  so  that  the  Divine  Fatherhood  had  not  to 
wait  for  perfect  self-expression    till  Jesus  was    born  and 


ETERNAL    FATHERHOOD  517 

grew  to  nmiiliood.  lu  such  a  view  there  is  a  final  vindi- 
cation of  the  Fatherhood  which  faith  has  always  valued, 
and  the  absence  of  which  is  always  felt  keenly.  It  is  not 
an  idea  divorced  from  history  ;  it  is  an  attempt,  on  the 
contrary,  to  set  forth  the  absolute  background  of  reality 
from  wliich  history  derives  its  significance,  and  to  exhibit 
the  gift  of  Christ  as  flowing  from  the  life  of  God.  To 
contend,  moreover,  that  it  is  a  conception  of  no  religious 
worth  is  flying  in  the  face  of  experience.  M.  Reville, 
certainly  no  advocate  of  Cliurch  tradition,  is  noticeably 
emphatic  on  the  point.  "  Tlie  Trinitarian  God,"  he  writes, 
"is  a  living  God.  He  is  not  the  unknown  principle 
seated  at  the  centre  of  all  things,  blind  and  deaf,  producing 
worlds  like  a  fermenting  substance  without  knowing  either 
what  He  is  or  what  He  does.  Xor,  again,  is  He  the 
purely  ideal  term  of  the  '  Universal  Becoming,'  that  God 
in  process  of  continual  evolution  who  does  not  create  the 
world,  but  is  created  by  the  world ;  a  future  God  who  will 
be,  but  at  present  is  not,  or  w^ho  at  least  only  murmurs  as 
yet  in  the  cradle  of  the  human  consciousness.  Finally, 
He  is  not  the  dreary  God  of  Deism,  that  supreme 
mechanician  retired  within  the  icy  depths  of  His  own 
eternity,  and  without  permanent  or  active  connection  with 
the  works  of  His  capricious  genius.  None  of  these  Gods 
is  a  being  we  can  worship.  To  present  them  to  the  human 
spirit  hungering  after  religion,  is  like  giving  stones  to  the 
poor  instead  of  bread."  ^  He  proceeds,  it  is  true,  to  re- 
commend the  notion  of  Divine  immanence  in  the  cosmos 
as  a  fit  modern  substitute  for  the  Trinity ;  but  it  is  plain 
that  this  notion,  so  far  from  mitigating  the  problems 
of  sin  and  sorrow,  leaves  them  precisely  as  they  were 
before. 

Certain  suggestive  writers  have  sought  to  present  the 
Trinitarian  idea  to  the  modern  mind  by  construing  it  in 
more  general  terms.  It  points  merely  to  the  richness  of 
the  Divine  existence.  It  tells  in  broken  human  words 
that  the  life  of  God  is  various  and  deep  and  manifold.      It 

^  History  of  the  Duijma  of  the  Deity  of  Jesus  Christ,  153-^. 


518  THE    PERSON    OF    JESUS    CHRIST 

rejects  the  audacious  yet  contemptible  illusion  that  we 
have  fathomed  or  surrounded  God  by  our  soaring  cogita- 
tions. Along  with  this,  it  is  sometimes  asked  why  the 
Divine  elements  or  factors  should  be  only  three ;  may 
there  not  be  many  others,  as  yet  unknown  to  us,  or  re- 
vealed in  other  worlds  ? 

Much  in  this  contention,  we  may  grant,  is  an  index  of 
great  and  imposing  truths.  The  history  of  thought  has 
proved  the  worthlessness  of  a  conception  of  God  which 
pictures  Him  as  a  bare,  single,  isolated  unit  of  deity. 
Without  active  distinctions  essential  to  His  being,  His 
own  spiritual  nature  and  His  relation  to  the  world  are 
alike  unintelligible  to  our  minds.  Life  as  such  is  ever 
complex,  with  a  complexity  that  deepens  and  intensifies 
as  it  mounts  in  the  scale  of  being.  The  inner  structure 
of  animate  things  reveals  a  constantly  increasing  differ- 
entiation, combined  with  and  constituted  by  an  always 
finer  and  more  perfect  unity.  Variety  and  organic  oneness 
exist  in  and  through  each  other.  Human  life,  moreover, 
unveiled  to  us  on  its  inner  side,  is  the  very  type  and 
criterion  of  a  manifold  held  together  in  vital  unity,  a 
multiplex  fulness  or  diversity  which  yet  is  articulated  and 
harmonised  in  one  focal  identity.  It  is  an  impressive 
argument,  therefore,  which  holds  that  if  Godhead  also  is 
seen  as  involving  a  real  variety  in  unison — distinct 
functions  irradiated  vitally  from  a  single  centre — this 
ultimate  intuition  falls  into  line  with,  and  completes, 
the  lower  forms  of  cognition.  We  have  a  right  to  ask 
whether  deity  can  be  an  eternal  life,  or  can  be  thought  as 
such,  except  on  terms  implying  a  varied  wealth  of  inner 
content.  But  while  this  is  so,  it  is  surely  a  departure 
from  Christian  ground  to  break  off  abruptly  at  this  point. 
What  the  revelation  mediated  in  history  denotes  is  no 
mere  vague  wealth  of  Divine  existence ;  but  eternal 
Fatherhood,  eternal  Sonship,  moving  within  the  eternal 
life  of  Spirit.  If  we  have  real  data  for  any  transcendent 
induction,  it  is  tliis  induction  we  must  make.  The 
Christian    mind  has  no    interest,  so  far  as  I  can  see,  in 


A    DIVINE    OTHER-THAN-SELF  519 

affirming  that  in  God  there  is  an  undefined  fnluess  or 
complexity,  or  that  still  other  intra-divine  factors,  like 
those  we  call  Son  and  Spirit,  may  one  day  be  disclosed. 
Our  thought  is  bound  by  the  historic  sources  of  Christian 
truth — the  spiritual  content  present  in  Jesus  and  sealed 
to  men  in  the  Spirit.^ 

(h)  Trinitarian  doctrine  of  the  type  now  in  question 
implies  at  least  a  duality  in  the  Divine  life,  in  virtue  of 
which  God's  love  and  knowledge  are  superior  to  time ;  but 
it  may  be  held  that  this  essential  other-than-self  is  given 
in  the  universe  as  a  whole.  If  we  do  not  believe  that  the 
universe  began  to  be,  we  have  no  need  to  speculate  further 
as  to  the  absolute  existence  of  the  Eternal.  Moreover, 
the  argument  for  a  vital  duality  can  never  yield  a  trinity ; 
it  gives  no  help  in  conceiving  the  third  Person  of  the 
Godhead,  thus  failing  at  a  crucial  point. 

One  feels  that  the  last  part  of  this  objection  is  vm- 
answerable,  and  must  be  accepted  frankly.  No  speculative 
argument  known  to  the  present  writer  has  the  slightest 
value  as  proving  a  third  Divine  distinction  which  is  either 
"  Holy  "  or  "  Spirit."  And  the  fact  is  a  strong  reminder 
that  the  origin  of  the  idea  of  Spirit,  in  its  Trinitarian 
meaning,  lies  not  in  philosophic  thought,  but  in  history 
and  life.^ 

But    the    former    part    of     the     objection    cannot    be 

1  Cf.  the  striking  words  of  Professor  G.  W.  Knox  :  "  The  Johannine 
writings,  which  presupiiosed  the  Pauline  movement,  are  a  protest  against 
the  hyper-spiritualising  tendency.  They  insist  that  the  Son  of  God  has 
been  incarnate  in  Jesus  of  Nazareth,  and  that  our  hands  have  handled  and 
our  eyes  have  seen  the  word  of  life.  This  same  purpose,  namely,  to  hold 
fast  to  the  historic  Jesus,  triumphed  in  the  doctrine  of  the  Trinity  ;  Jesus 
was  not  to  be  resolved  into  an  seon  or  into  some  mysterious  ti-rtium  quid, 
neither  God  nor  man,  but  to  be  recognised  as  very  God  who  redeemed  the 
soul.  Through  him  men  were  to  understand  the  Father  and  to  understand 
themselves  as  God's  children.  Thus  the  doctrine  of  the  Trinity  satisfied  at 
once  the  philosophic  intelligence  of  scholars  and  the  religious  needs  of 
Christians.  Only  thus  can  its  adoption  and  ultimate  accejjtance  be  explained. 
Its  doctrinal  form  is  the  philosojihic  statement  of  beliefs  held  by  the  common 
people,  who  hnd  little  interest  in  theology,  but  whose  faith  centred  in  Jesus  " 
(from  article  "Christianity,"  Enajd.  Brit.  11th  ed.  vol.  vi.  284-85). 

2  Cf.  Thieme,  in  ZTK.  (1911),  84  ff. 


520  THE   PERSON    OF   JESUS    CHRIST 

sustained.  Nothing  is  easier  than  to  write  vaguely  of  the 
world  as  adequate  either  to  the  knowledge  or  the  love  of 
God,  yet  on  closer  scrutiny  nothing  could  be  more  uncon- 
vincing. After  all,  the  only  rational  creatures  known  to 
us  who  are  capable  of  appreciating  God's  love,  and  return- 
ing it,  are  human  beings.  That  other  spiritual  beings  may 
exist  is  of  course  very  credible,  but  we  cannot  seriously 
be  held  to  have  direct  cognition  of  them.  Therefore  it  is 
to  argue  purely  from  our  ignorance  when  the  world,  or  the 
universe,  is  held  to  be  a  sufficient  eternal  object.  If  the 
world  means  the  physical  cosmos,  it  cannot  properly  be 
loved  at  all,  not  to  speak  of  its  loving  the  lover ;  if  it 
means  or  includes  finite  spirits,  we  have  no  certainty  that 
these  have  existed  from  the  first,  for  men  began  to  be 
quite  recently.  So  that  if  we  are  in  quest  of  an  adequate 
object  of  the  Divine  love  and  knowledge,  and  if  by 
adequate  we  intend,  as  we  should,  an  object  which  not  only 
receives  the  forthcoming  of  the  eternal  Self-consciousness 
but  responds  to  it,  with  equal  infinitude,  then  this  object 
exists  nowhere  within  the  universe ;  it  is  to  be  found  only 
in  God  Himself.  Subject  and  object  are  correlative,  be  it 
in  finite  or  in  transcendent  Mind.  In  perfect  knowledge 
or  love  or  action,  object  and  subject  are  necessarily 
conceived  as  personal  in  quality ;  and  when  thought 
reaches  the  ideal  limit  of  those  relationships,  it  rests  in  a 
distinction  which  yet  is  mediated  unity. 

The  value  of  such  considerations  may  be  illustrated  by 
the  well-known  attempt  of  the  late  Dr.  Martineau  to 
resolve  the  problem.  As  against  pantheism,  which  admits 
of  nothing  objective  to  God,  since  He  is  but  the  inner  side 
of  nature.  Dr.  Martineau  (so  far  at  one  with  Hegel  and 
Spencer)  argues  powerfully  that  the  Divine  Spirit  must 
distinguish  itself  from  what  is  other.  "  The  moment  we 
conceive  of  mind  at  all,"  he  writes,  "  or  any  operation  of 
mind,  we  must  concurrently  conceive  of  something  other 
than  it  as  engaging  its  activity.  .  .  .  God,  therefore,  cannot 
stand  for  us  as  the  sole  and  exhaustive  term  in  the  realm 
of  uncreated  being ;  as  early  and  as  long  as  he  is,  must 


A    DIVINE    OTHER-THAN-SELP  521 

also  be  soiuetliing  objective  to  bim."  ^  Tbis  otlier-tliaii- 
self  for  God  be  discovers  first  in  matter-filled  space;  later 
and  more  adequately,  he  believes,  in  finite  centres  of 
individuality,  furnisbing  a  province  of  real  being  objective 
to  God  in  the  complete  degree.  But  if  we  refuse  "  to 
stake  God's  existence  on  the  eternity  of  matter  and  finite 
creatures,"  ^  while  yet  we  agree  with  Martineau  in  regard- 
ing a  personal  self-expression  or  object  as  necessary  for  the 
Divine  Spirit,  it  will  be  natural  to  resort  to  the  great  New 
Testament  conception  of  the  unbeginning  Word,  in  whom 
is  given  the  resonance  of  life  vital  to  either  love  or 
knowledge  in  perfect  form,  yet  not  separate  from  God  as 
we  from  other  selves. 

Thus  reason  may  find  its  own  in  the  Christian 
certitude  that  love  Divine  is  from  everlasting  to  everlast- 
ing. When  we  think  of  God  in  Himself,  possessed  of  that 
subjectivity,  that  centralised  thought,  activity,  and  feeling 
without  which  self-consciousness  is  but  a  name,  it  is  not  as 
a  formless  Void  that  we  conceive  Him,  or  as  a  silent  vast 
Omnipresence ;  it  is  as  the  home  of  the  loftiest  and  most 
spiritual  relations  manifested  in  human  life.  Fatherhood 
is  no  acquired  attribute ;  we  cannot  image  that  love  as 
sleeping  before  it  woke  to  shed  its  beneficence  on  an 
object  other  than  itself.  It  is  not  creation  which  enables 
us  to  interpret  the  absolute  Personality.  Eather  it  is  our 
view  of  that  Personality  which  enables  us  to  interpret 
creation  ;  for  no  God  complete  in  loneliness  could  feel  the 
impulse  to  create,  least  of  all  to  create  potential  sous.  In 
other  words,  the  relations  of  God  and  man  become 
luminous  in  view  of  the  interior  Divine  life.  That 
life  is  neither  loveless  thought,  nor  abstract  thought, 
nor  mere  boundless  energy ;  we  are  nearest  to  the 
infinite  truth  when  in  Fatherhood  and  Sonship  we 
symbolise  vital  distinctions  apart  from  which  Godhead 
cannot  be. 

It  is  easy,  of  course,  to  call   this  metaphysics,  and  so 

^  Seat  of  Authority  in  Religion,  32. 

'  T.  Vincent  Tymns,  in  The  Ancient  Faith  in  Modern  Light,  82. 


522  THE   PERSON    OF   JESUS    CHRIST 

dismiss  the  topic  with  a  word.  But  the  accusation  is  a 
harmless  one  unless  it  can  be  proved  that  metaphysics,  in 
this  connection,  is  anything  more  than  a  name  for 
persistent  thinking.  Faith  in  Christ  will  always  constrain 
thoughtful  men  to  construe  in  reason  His  ultimate  relation 
to  God  and  man,  so  far  as  this  is  possible ;  and  the  limits 
of  possibility  can  be  ascertained  in  no  other  way  than  by 
actual  experiment.  There  is  no  mode  of  knowing  whether 
we  are  on  the  way  to  truth  save  the  process  of  knowledge 
itself.  Eeligion,  certainly,  has  no  interest  in  suppressing 
the  instinctive  effort  of  the  mind  to  follow  out  this  supreme 
inquiry  to  the  farthest  point.  As  it  has  been  expressed : 
"  The  reasons  which  prevent  us  from  acquiescing  in  the 
proposal  to  banish  the  metaphysical  element  from  our 
theology  .  .  .  are  to  be  found  in  the  nature  of  the 
metaphysical  interest  itself.  That  motive  is  not  merely 
speculative ;  it  is  intensely  practical.  It  is  the  desire  for 
a  unified  world-view  which  voices  itself  in  the  demand  for 
a  philosophical  theology."^  No  one  to-day  will  dream  of 
constructing  a  Trinitarian  doctrine  a  'priori ;  the  sufficiency 
of  the  syllogism  in  such  a  realm  has  ceased  to  be  obvious : 
but  the  clear  duty  of  the  Christian  thinker — as  will  be 
acknowledged  once  more  when  the  present  disparagement  of 
reason  has  passed  by — is  to  relate  Jesus  Christ  intelligibly 
to  the  inmost  and  eternal  life  of  God.  He  has  no  option 
but  to  do  this ;  his  instinctive  impulse  is  to  do  it ;  and  the 
impulse  is  restrained  only  in  obedience  to  a  particular 
theory  of  knowledge.  Why  the  effort  to  translate  the 
initial  certitude  of  faith — which  no  subsequent  speculative 
procedure  can  impair — into  a  luminous  conviction  of  the 
mind  should  be  flouted  as  superfluous,  or  even  as  an 
attempt  upon  the  Christian  religion,  it  is  not  easy  to  see ; 
and  reason  is  sure  to  avenge  itself  by  the  gibe  that  faith, 
in  submission  to  the  unintelligible,  is  simply  indifferent  to 
the  truth.  There  is  room  in  theology  for  a  knowledge  that 
is  not  so  much  disinterested   as    interested  purely  in  its 

^  Adams  Brown,  Christian  Theology  in  Outline,  159.     The  whole  of  hia 
finely-toned  chapter  on  the  Trinity  should  be  read. 


ETERNAL    LOVE    AND    ITS    OBJECT  523 

object,  and  cares  enough  about  C!od  to  know  Ilini  in  His 
own  nature. 

(c)  It  may  be  objected,  finally,  that  tlie  duality  within 
the  Godhead  is  the  equivalent  of  ditheism.  To  say  that 
love  is  not  love  if  there  be  no  beloved ;  to  maintain 
that  Divine  love  is  "  social,"  with  an  iinbeirinninff 
relation  of  F'ather  and  Son — if  at  least  by  Son  is  meant 
a  conscious  being,  distinct  alike  from  God,  the  world,  and 
the  human  Jesus ;  this,  it  is  urged,  is  to  drift  into  a 
polytheistic  view  of  deity.  Moreover,  the  "  social "  con- 
ception of  God  has  not  the  slenderest  title  to  pose  as 
orthodoxy  proper.  It  is  notorious  that  Augustine  rested 
upon  a  trinity  in  the  individual  human  mind — memory, 
understanding,  and  will  in  one  place ;  the  mind,  self- 
knowledge,  and  self-love  in  another — and  that  he  used 
this  psychological  analogy  without  misgiving  to  interpret 
the  supreme  Godhead,  arguing  on  this  basis  that  each  of 
the  Persons  singly  is  equal  to  all  the  Persons  together : 
each,  that  is,  is  simply  God  in  a  certain  aspect.  In  like 
manner,  Aquinas  views  the  three  Persons  as  respectively 
the  principles  of  Origination,  Wisdom,  and  Will.  There 
is  obviously  no  tritheism  in  a  construction  based  on  the 
analogy  of  a  single  human  self-consciousness. 

It  is  of  course  undeniable  that  Church  theology  has 
often  preferred  a  psychological  line  of  this  sort.  One 
disadvantage,  however,  is  that  Trinitarian  doctrine  in  this 
form  has  no  perceptible  relation  to  the  historic  Christ,  whose 
true  Godhead  it  was  meant  originally  to  record  and 
synthesise  with  older  conceptions  of  the  Divine.  Why 
"  understanding "  in  Augustine's  first  theory  should  be 
the  eternal  equivalent  of  the  Divine  Son  who  lived  on 
earth,  it  is  difficult  to  comprehend.  What  he  offers  is 
but  a  distinction  of  ideas,  or  of  psychical  constituents, 
quite  unrelated,  so  far  as  can  be  seen,  to  the  historic 
antecedents  by  which  the  doctrine  must  be  judged  and 
sanctioned. 

But  when  we  turn  to  the  form  of  doctrine  inspired  by 
the  analogy  of  love  as  implying  a  real  duality,  a  subject 


524  THE    PERSON    OF   JESUS    CHRIST 

and  an  object  in  complete  reciprocation,  the  difficulties 
of  a  genuine  and  unflinching  monotheism  become  more 
grave. 

True,  the  word  "  Person  "  is  not  in  itself  decisive.  A 
high  authority  has  said  that  "  Person,  in  Trinitarian  usage, 
is  a  mode  of  being  which  serves  as  a  ground  or  basis 
(a  real  ground  or  basis)  of  special  function,  but  just  stops 
short  of  separate  individuality.  It  implies  distinction 
without  division."  ^  Words  in  such  a  realm  are  more  or 
less  arbitrary,  and  must  be  takeu  in  a  sense  appropriate  to 
their  objects  of  denotation  ;  and  it  is  certain  that  vTroaraai'; 
in  Greek  theology,  and  persona,  its  Latin  equivalent,  do  not 
mean  now,  and  never  have  meant,  what  we  usually  intend 
by  Personality.  In  strictness,  theu,  as  was  argued  pre- 
viously, we  use  the  word  "  Person  "  from  simple  poverty  of 
language :  to  indicate  our  belief,  that  is,  in  the  reality  of 
Divine  distinctions,  not  to  affirm  separate  conscious  beings, 
possessed  of  separate  "  essences."  If  it  be  said  that  this 
description  of  such  interior  distinctions  is  negative  merely, 
the  comment,  however  just,  is  by  no  means  fatal  to  its 
validity.  Most  Christian  thinkers  are  agreed  that  God  is 
causa  sui,  and  that  He  is  omnipresent ;  yet  when  we  look 
into  our  own  minds,  are  not  these  phrases,  however 
necessary,  laden  with  a  sense  predominantly  negative  ? 
When  we  use  them,  we  are  affirming  that  God  owes  reality 
to  Himself  alone,  and  that  He  is  nowise  limited  by  space. 
The  conceptions,  in  other  words,  can  never  be  positively 
defined,  yet  we  are  obliged  to  grant  their  truth. 

At  this  extreme  point  we  obtain  most  real  help, 
perhaps,  from  the  thought  that  in  God  conditions  essential 
to  love,  which  in  us  imply  mutually  exclusive  personalities, 
may  exist  without  such  exclusion,  in  a  unity  that  is  more 
and  deeper  than  the  distinction.  One  feels  that  too  often 
the  criticism  of  Trinitarian  doctrine  has  rested  on  a  narrow, 
individualist  conception  of  personal  life ;  a  conception 
animated  and  contiollod  by  a  static  view  of  human  experi- 
ence. For  it  is  cle;ir  that  even  in  human  love  the  inter- 
^  Saiiday,  Personality  in  Christ  and  in  Ourfelves,  19. 


PERSONALITY    NOT    IMPERVIOUS  525 

personal  exclusion  just  referred  to  is  largely  overcome.^ 
This  is  simple  matter  of  fact,  and  the  best  philosophy  has 
not  been  slow  to  recognise  it.  Take  these  words  of  Nettle- 
ship  on  the  ideal  of  life  as  universal  love.  "  So  far  as  we 
can  conceive  such  a  state,"  he  writes,  "  it  would  be  one  in 
which  there  would  be  no  '  individuals '  at  all,  in  the  sense 
in  which  individuality  means  mutual  exclusion :  there 
w^ould  be  a  universal  being  in  and  for  another :  '  conscious- 
ness '  would  be  the  consciousness  of  '  another '  which  was 
also  'oneself — a  common  consciousness."^  What  if  this 
transcendent  ideal  is  for  ever  real  in  the  life  of  God  ? 
May  not  we,  looking  still  towards  the  innermost  recesses, 
believe  that  in  Him  a  merged  and  blended  unity  of  love 
with  its  equal  object  is  eternally  attained ;  attained  none 
the  less  because  our  diviyive  and  spatialised  logic  is 
incompetent  to  set  it  forth  without  tritheistic  error  ? 
Bergson  has  taught  us  that  it  is  impossible  to  think  even 
the  vital  unity  of  movement  or  of  life,  save  intuitively ;  so 
the  Godhead,  which  does  not  any  more  than  life  itself  form 
a  picture  we  can  see,  may  signify  Father,  Son,  and  Spirit 
as  members  or  manifestations  of  a  single  Divine  life  beyond 
the  limits  of  time,  forming  together  the  supreme  instance 
of  individuality.  This  interfusion  of  personalities  in  a 
common  life,  never  realised  save  imperfectly  by  us,  may 
have  been  fully  actualised  and  vmimpeded  in  the  love  hid 
in  God  from  all  eternity. 

Thus,  faintly,  under  the  form  of  idealised  human 
relationships,  we  envisage  that  which  perpetually  evades 
our  grasp.  How  can  we,  whose  being  is  finitely  individual 
and  (so  far)  apart  from  other  selves,  apprehend  God  truly 
or  with  perfect  clarity  ?  AVe  cannot  place  our  minds 
inside  that  transcendence  or  perceive  it  inwardly  by 
feeling ;  for  only  that  which  we  have  lived  can  ever 
become  luminous  to  us.  But  at  least  we  may  refrain  from 
imposing    upon    it    our    own    particularity.      If  there    be 

»  Cf.  supra,  p.  338  f. 

*  Philoso2>hical  llcmains,  vol.  i.  42  (quoted  by  Temple,  The  Nature  of 
Personality,  76).     See  also  Mobcrly,  Atonement  and  Personality,  156  ff. 


526  THE    PERSON    OF    JESUS    CHRIST 

mystery  in  the  Trinitarian  conception,  a  deeper  mystery, 
and  one  aggravated  by  ethical  enigmas,  must  always  lie 
in  the  notion  of  a  solitary  God,  without  love,  void  of 
thouglit,  incapable  of  movement,  divorced  from  all  reality. 
We  read  the  great  words :  "  Father,  glorify  Thou  Me  with 
Thine  own  self  with  the  glory  which  I  had  with  Thee 
before  the  world  was " ;  and  as  their  solemn  and  elusive 
wonder  lingers  on  the  soul  we  feel  again  how  noble  and 
subduing  is  that  vision  of  the  One  God  which  beholds  Him 
as  never  alone,  but  always  the  Father  towards  whom  the 
Son  has  ever  been  looking  in  the  Spirit  of  eternal  love. 

Yet  it  is  in  the  unity  of  God  as  known  in  Christ  that 
our  minds  come  finally  to  rest.  The  triune  life  is 
apprehended  by  us  for  the  sake  of  its  redemptive  ex- 
pression, not  for  the  internal  analysis  of  its  content.  The 
problem  can  never  be  one  of  ontology  mixed  with 
arithmetic.  Throughout,  our  aim  is  bent  on  history  and  its 
meaning,  as  we  strive  to  apprehend  the  one  God  in  His 
saving  manifestation.  To  this  point  of  view  faith  is 
constant.  From  this  point  the  doctrine  must  set  out 
only  to  circle  round  at  last  to  its  fruitful  origin.  God  as 
Holy  Love  we  name  the  Father ;  this  same  eternal  God, 
as  making  the  sacrifice  of  love  and  appearing  in  one  finite 
spirit  for  our  redemption,  we  name  the  Son ;  God  filling 
as  new  life  the  hearts  to  which  His  Son  has  become  a 
revelation,  we  name  the  Spirit.  In  this  confession  we 
resume  the  best  it  has  been  given  us  to  know  of  the 
eternal  God  our  Saviour. 


APPENDIX. 

JESUS'  BIRTH  OF  A  VIRGIN. 

During  the  nineteenth  century  the  words  of  the  Apostles' 
Creed,  "conceived  of  the  Holy  Ghost,  born  of  the  Virgin 
Mary,"  were  more  than  once  the  subject  of  vehement 
dispute.  Controversy  prevailed  among  German  scholars  in 
1877,  and  again  in  1893;  and  on  each  occasion  the  after- 
swell  of  the  storm  beat  upon  British  shores.  The  theme  is 
one  to  be  discussed  quietly  and  without  prejudice.  For  my 
own  part,  I  should  not  think  of  regarding  explicit  belief  in 
the  virgin-birth  of  our  Lord  as  essential  to  Christian  faith — 
otherwise,  St.  Paul  was  no  Christian ;  while,  on  the  other 
hand,  the  story  has  an  exquisite  natural  fitness,  and  its 
vogue  is  nearly  impossible  to  explain  save  by  the  hypothesis 
of  its  truth. 

The  main  aspects  of  the  problem  are  two — the  critical 
and  the  doctrinal ;  distinct,  indeed,  yet  in  no  sense  separate. 
Thus  it  is  of  the  first  importance  to  recollect  that  the 
birth  in  question  is  that  of  Jesus  Christ.  Virgin-birth 
is  exceptional  in  character,  as  resurrection  also  is ;  and 
on  any  showing  Jesus  was,  as  a  person,  utterly  exceptional. 
Apart  from  Him,  the  idea  of  supernatural  conception  is  not 
even  plausible.  Hence,  whether  we  are  to  call  the  birth- 
narratives  only  a  childish  attempt  to  utter  Jesus'  greatness, 
or  valid  testimony  to  a  historic  fact,  will  much  depend 
on  the  spiritual  impression  He  has  made  upon  us.  On  the 
other  hand,  it  is  not  less  true  that  if  virgin-birth  cannot  be 
put  in  any  significant  relation  to  Christ,  and  is  merely 
irrelevant  to  the  believing  interpretation  of  His  self- 
consciousness,  its  credibility  is  gravely  lessened. 

For  a  discussion  of  the  critical  problem,  the  reader  is 
referred  to  the  commentaries  and  special  studies.  We  can 
touch  only  a  few  cardinal  points. 

In  the  First  and  Third  Gospels,  the  higher  Sonship  of 

527 


528  THE    PERSON    OF   JESUS    CHRIST 

Jesus  is  depicted  as  having  been  mediated  in  part  by  the 
reception  of  the  Spirit  at  His  baptism,  in  part  by  abnormal 
birth.  Of  the  early  variants  in  Mt  1^^  it  has  been  said 
recently  that  "  such  moditications  as  may  be  due  to  doctrinal 
prepossessions  are  designed  to  re-set  or  to  sharpen  the 
reference  in  the  original  text  to  the  virgin-birth,  not  to 
insert  the  dogma  in  a  passage  which  was  originally  free 
from  it."  ^  Nor  has  the  case  been  made  out  for  removing 
Lk  134-35  as  an  interpolation,  although  this  would  give 
us  a  Lucan  version  of  which  virgin-birth  at  first  formed  no 
part.  But  Mark  knows  nothing  of  the  story,  nor  does  it 
seem  to  have  found  a  place  in  Q.  The  genealogies  which, 
if  not  contradictory,  are  certainly  independent,  connect 
Jesus  with  David  through  Joseph,  not  Mary ;  but  this  may 
mean  that  the  evangelists  have  only  imperfectly  adapted 
these  documents,  which  they  found  already  in  existence, 
to  the  purpose  of  expressing  legal  kinship  but  not  physical 
parentage.  In  any  case,  Jesus  must  have  ranked  as  Joseph's 
son  before  the  law.  Various  writers  have  dwelt  on 
the  fact  that  Luke  writes  from  Mary's  point  of  view, 
Matthew  from  Joseph's.  As  might  be  expected,  therefore, 
the  narratives  diverge;  but  they  agree  in  the  parents' 
names,  the  places  of  birth  and  boyhood,  descent  from 
David,  and  the  special  action  of  the  Holy  Spirit.  It  is 
not  a  grave  objection  that  the  evangelists  repeatedly 
mention  Joseph  as  Jesus'  father.  Quite  consistently 
they  may  reflect  or  report  popular  opinion  in  certain 
places  while  giving  elsewhere  information  drawn  from  a 
private  source. 

Outside  these  narratives,  the  New  Testament  is  com- 
pletely silent.  Virgin-birth  is  not  present  in  Gal  4*,  nor 
even  hinted  at ;  for  the  phrase  "  born  of  a  woman "  is  a 
familiar  phrase,  used  by  Jesus  Himself  of  men  as  such 
(Mt  10^^).  Few  would  say,  with  Westcott,  that  virgin- 
birth  is  implied  though  not  explicitly  asserted  in  John  1^*: 
"  the  Word  became  flesh."  Still  it  is  difficult  to  believe 
that  if  John  had  regarded  the  story  as  inaccurate,  he 
would  have  uttered  no  word  of  protest.  The  Synoptics  were 
before  him ;  silence,  presumably,  means  not  disapproval 
but  tacit  aquiescence,  coupled  with  a  statement  in  his 
Prologue  of  what  he  conceived  to  be  a  deeper  truth. 
There  is  no  contradiction,  such  as  has  often  been  alleged, 
between   birth   of   a   virgin   and   pre-existence,  though   in 

^  Moffatt,  Introduction  to  the  Literature  of  the  NT,  251. 


JESUs'    LilRTH    OF    A    VllUilN  529 

point  of  fact  no  New  Testament  writer  happens  to  mention 
both.  Luke,  the  Panlinist,  can  scarcely  have  been  un- 
familiar with  the  idea  of  pre-existence ;  and  virgin-birth 
may  have  stood  in  his  mind  less  as  the  ultimate  ground  of 
Jesus'  Sonship  than  as  the  mediating  occasion  of  His 
presence,  as  Son,  in  the  world.  It  is  not  easy  to  see  why 
a  particular  mode  of  birth  should  be  thought  incongruous 
with  the  idea  of  pre-temporal  life.  Kesch  and  Blass  have 
argued  that  with  some  ancient  versions  we  should  read  the 
singular  pronoun  in  Jn  V^ — not  "  who  were  born,"  but 
"  who  was  born,  not  of  blood,  nor  of  the  will  of  the  Hesh,  nor 
of  the  will  of  man,  but  of  God  " ;  the  subject  thus  being  the 
Incarnate  One.  But  this  is  hardly  serious.  In  the  case 
of  St.  Paul,  again,  silence  can  only  mean  ignorance  of  a 
story  even  then  jealously  guarded  within  a  narrow  circle. 
There  is  indeed  much  to  be  thankful  for  in  the  providential 
circumstance  that  the  method  of  our  Lord's  entering  the 
world  was  not  at  first  made  the  subject  of  doctrinal 
reflection. 

One  thing,  however,  the  silence  of  St.  Paul  does  prove. 
It  proves  that  an  apostle  could  hold  and  teach  the  eternal 
Sonship  of  Christ  without  reference  to  virgin-birth  ;  which 
in  turn  is  good  evidence  that  in  the  case  of  Matthew  and 
Luke  the  belief  need  not  have  been  an  irresistible  religious 
postulate.  It  was  not  a  psychologically  inevitable  idea 
which  had  to  be  introduced  at  any  cost.  The  evangelists 
felt  that  the  testimony  was  good. 

For  history  the  really  strong  argument  in  favour  of  the 
virgin-birth  is  the  difficulty  of  accounting  for  the  story 
otherwise  than  on  the  assumption  of  its  truth.  Harnack, 
who  traces  everything  to  Is  T^'*,  enumerates  thirteen  other 
theories  of  origin  ;  ^  and  the  curious  list  might  he  added  to. 
If  the  Old  Testament,  however,  shows  any  leaning,  it  is  not 
to  glorify  virginity  as  opposed  to  marriage,  but  rather  the 
other  way.  There  seems  to  have  been  no  expectation  that 
the  Messiah's  birth  would  be  abnormal ;  not  a  trace  is 
discoverable  of  a  Messianic  exegesis  of  Is  7^*;^  while  the 
far-fetched  way  in  which  the  verse  is  adduced  by  Matthew 
shows  that  he  is  only  clenching  his  statement  with  a  proof- 
text,  not  inferentiaily  deriving  a  new  fact.  He  simply 
quotes  Isaiah  to  repel  innuendoes  against  Mary's  honour. 

^  Dogmengeschichte*,  i.  113. 

*  See  Professor  Buchanan  Gray's  masterly  argument  in  the  Expositor  for 
April  1911. 

34 


530  THE   PERSON    OF    JESUS    CHRIST 

And  the  supposed  influence  of  heathen  mythology  would 
require  a  longer  time  than  New  Testament  criticism  will 
allow.  Further,  in  the  Gospel  story  there  is  a  pure  and 
beautiful  reticence  which  has  nothing  in  common  with  Greek 
or  Hindu  narrations  of  birth  from  a  Divine  and  a  human 
parent;  narrations  which  anyhow  do  not  tell  of  virgin- 
birth  at  all,  but  of  gods  possessed  with  human  passions.  It 
is  indeed  strictly  veracious,  as  Dr.  Orr  has  proved,^  to  say 
that  no  ethnic  parallel  to  birth  from  a  pure  virgin  has  been 
found.  The  contrary  is  often  stated,  but  at  the  crucial 
point  the  alleged  parallel  invariably  breaks  down ;  and 
even  radical  critics  are  obliged  to  grant  that  pagan  ideas, 
if  adopted  by  the  evangelists,  were  transformed  out  of 
all  recognition.^  Not  only  so;  but  the  early  chapters  of 
Matthew  and  Luke  are  in  tone  intensely  Hebraic.  They 
must  have  arisen  in  Palestinian  circles.  The  attitude  of 
first-century  Christians  to  pagan  tales  regarding  the  celestial 
descent  of  Alexander  the  Great,  Plato,  or  Augustus,  can 
only  have  been  one  of  indignant  horror.  We  are  therefore 
entitled  to  believe  that  in  reading  these  early  traditions 
we  have  before  us  matter  with  a  high  claim  to  credibility. 
Nor  does  it  come  to  us  divorced  from  the  rest  of  the 
evangelic  story  by  a  long,  precarious  interval  of  years.  On 
the  contrary,  even  so  radical  a  critic  as  Johannes  Weiss  has 
expressed  the  view  that  the  contents  of  Luke  1  and  2 
may  have  circulated  in  the  Jewish  Christian  communities  of 
Judaea  "  in  the  'sixties."  ^ 

At  the  same  time,  considerations  of  history  are  not 
decisive  by  themselves.  The  evidence  might  conceivably 
be  much  stronger  than  it  is,  though,  as  it  has  been  put,  it  is 
"  strong  enough  for  rational  acceptance."  When  we  turn 
then  to  more  theological  considerations,  it  is  necessary  to 
have  before  us  clearly  what  the  negative  argument  exactly 
is. 

While  the  origin  of  Jesus'  person  must  be  traced  to 
God's  creative  power,  and  thus  to  miracle  in  the  true 
sense,  and  while  this  is  the  proper  religious  significance  of 
the  words,  "  conceived  of  the  Holy  Ghost,"  no  conviction  (it 
may  be  held)  is  attainable  as  to  the  form  or  medium  of  this 
Divine  creation.  We  know  that  the  Saviour  is  from  above ; 
we  do  not  know  how  He  came  to  be  here  in  that  character. 

^  The  Virgin  Birth  of  Christ,  chap.  vi. 

^  Cf.  J.  Weiss  in  Religion  in  Geschichte  u.  Gegcnwart,  i.  1736-37. 

3  Die  Schri/ten  d.  NT,  i.  412. 


JESUS'    BIRTH    OV    A    VIROIN  531 

Unless  marriage  is  sinful,  neither  His  sinlessness  nor  His 
unique  Sonship  requires  the  guarantee  of  virgin-birth.  If 
we  insist  on  such  a  guarantee,  it  is  certainly  not  supplied 
by  the  absence  of  human  paternity.  There  is  also  the 
motherhood  of  Mary,  through  whose  natural  relation  to  Him 
sinful  dispositions  might  be  as  really  transmitted  as  through 
normal  birth. 

"With  the  inference  drawn  from  these  premises  I  do 
not  myself  agree ;  but  it  is  undeniable  that  the  term 
"  miraculous  "  might  justly  be  applied  to  the  genesis  of  our 
Lord's  manhood  even  on  this  theory.  We  can  say  out  of  our 
experience  that  He  belongs  to  a  higher  sphere ;  that  the 
resident  forces  of  humanity  were  insufficient  to  produce 
Him.  In  this  sense  at  any  rate  He  was  no  child  of  earth  ; 
He  was  the  Son  of  God.  But  we  dare  not  call  virgin-birth 
a  81716  qua  non  of  Sonship.  The  immediate  object  of  faith  is 
Christ  living,  dying,  and  exalted ;  and  we  cannot  imagine 
Christ  Himself  insisting  on  acceptance  of  the  birth- 
narratives  as  a  condition  or  preliminary  of  personal  salva- 
tion. At  the  same  time,  strong  grounds  can  be  adduced  for 
accepting  the  belief  as  in  complete  harmony  with  the 
Christian  thought  of  Jesus,  as  dove-tailing  into  the  rest  of 
our  conviction  naturally  and  simply.  But  first  it  is  well  to 
say  emphatically  that  arguments  drawn  from  biology  as  to 
the  possibility  of  what  is  called  parthenogenesis  are  wholly 
beside  the  mark.  If  the  virgin-birth  is  real,  its  meaning 
is  indissociably  bound  up  with  its  supernatural  character ; 
and  this  should  be  avowed  frankly. 

(1)  There  is  the  companion  fact  of  the  resurrection. 
Supernatural  conception  is  a  most  credible  and  befitting 
preface  to  a  life  consummated  by  rising  from  the  dead. 
This  is  an  argument  the  force  of  which  grows  upon  one  the 
more  it  is  considered.  "It  is  in  harmony,"  says  Professor 
Denney,  "with  that  unique  relation  to  God  and  man  which 
is  of  the  essence  of  His  consciousness,  that  there  should  be 
something  unique  in  the  mode  of  His  entrance  into  the  world 
as  well  as  in  that  of  His  leaving  it."^  The  alleged  singu- 
larity, in  other  words,  is  appropriate  to  the  character  and 
the  occasion.  Leaving  aside  all  efforts  to  prove  virgin-birth 
a  necessity  {e.g.  to  break  the  sinful  entail),  we  have  a  right 
to  dwell  on  the  fitness  of  such  an  exordium  in  a  life  which, 
if  we  grant  the  transcendent  victory  over  death  at  its  close, 
was  in  any  case  supernaturally  qualified.  The  case  is  one 
*  Standard  Dictionary  of  the  Bible,  423. 


532  THE    PERSON    OF    JESUS    CHRIST 

more  for  the  application  of  the  category  of  H  Trpiirov  than  of 
TO  avayy.aTov.  It  was  through  the  resurrection  that  Christ 
entered  on  full  activity  as  Lord ;  what  more  intrinsically 
congruous  than  that  His  initial  work  on  earth  should  begin, 
as  well  as  end,  with  that  which  marked  Him  off  from  all 
other  children  of  men  ?  If  Christ  is  Son  of  God  in  a  lonely 
and  unshared  sense,  free  from  all  taint  of  sin,  and  Head  of  a 
redeemed  race,  He  is  clearly  so  unexampled  a  person  that  we 
cannot  assume  Him  to  have  been  subject  either  in  birth  or 
death  to  all  normal  sequences.  This  is  not  indeed  to  prove 
the  virgin-birth.  As  it  has  been  put :  "  It  does  not  follow 
that  a  thing  actually  happened,  because  it  appears  to  us 
likely  and  becoming  that  it  should  happen."  Nor  is  it 
to  make  the  supernatural  birth  of  Jesus  the  ground  of, 
say,  His  sinlessness.  A  moral  fact  is  not  explicable  ulti- 
mately by  one  which  is  physical.  But  we  may  reason- 
ably insist  on  the  vital  unity  or  parallelism  of  spirit 
and  body,  finding  it  wholly  natural  that  a  unique  human 
spirit  should  also  have  a  body  uniquely  conditioned  in  its 
origin. 

(2)  One  minor  point  may  be  glanced  at.  Some  of  those 
who  reject  the  virgin-birth  of  Jesus,  while  maintaining  His 
perfect  sinlessness,  explain  this  unique  absence  of  moral 
taint  by  summoning  to  their  aid  other  supernatural  factors ; 
and  it  then  becomes  a  question  whether  such  intercalated 
factors  are  not  more  miraculous,  as  well  as  more  unintel- 
ligible, than  the  evangelic  story.  Schleiermacher,  e.g.,  has 
argued  that  birth  took  place  in  normal  ways,  whereas  the 
creative  power  of  God  intervened  to  bar  the  transnn'ssion  of 
inborn  sin.  Of  this  it  can  only  be  remarked  that  it  too 
affirms  a  special  act  of  interference  on  the  part  of  God,  and 
one  for  which  there  exists  in  the  record  not  the  faintest 
trace  of  evidence.  Mystere  pour  mystere,  the  account  of 
Luke  and  Matthew  is  to  be  preferred. 

(3)  The  point  of  real  importance  is  positive  rather  than 
negative ;  not  the  absence  of  a  human  father,  but  the  over- 
shadowing presence  of  the  Divine  Spirit.  The  evangelists 
do  not  lead  us  to  regard  the  birth  as  derived  from  the  Spirit 
acting  as  bare  power ;  the  event  has  an  essentially  ethical 
aspect.  This  is  furnished,  we  may  consider,  by  the  faith 
and  holy  obedience  of  Mary,  reacting  upon  the  higher  in- 
fluences from  above.  There  is  no  magic  in  the  miracle ;  no 
absence  of  mediating  forces  in  the  spiritual  and  moral  realm. 
Jesus  is  born  a  man,  in  a  relation  of  true  heredity  to  His 


jerur'  btrth  of  a  virgin  533 

mother,  and,  through  her  faith,  to  the  grace  and  piety  of  the 
past.  His  is  a  new  Innnanity,  unique  in  perfectness  of 
initial  constitution,  but  grafted  by  God's  creative  act  into 
the  older  stem. 

When  we  look  at  these  two  forms  of  evidence  simultane- 
ously— the  excellence  of  the  tradition  together  with  the 
spiritual  fitness  of  virgin-birth — they  seem  to  involve  each 
other,  much  like  the  arms  of  a  great  arch  rising  up  to  meet 
and  join. 

I  have  already  expressed  my  complete  incredulity  as  to 
the  existence  of  precise  heathen  parallels  to  the  Gospel 
story.  But  even  if  we  grant  the  point,  what  then  ?  Then 
we  shall  have  once  more  to  recognise  that  the  ethnic  world 
had  been  dreaming  of  great  things  yet  to  be.  As  with  ideas 
like  those  of  Incarnation,  Atonement,  Eesurrection,  and 
many  more,  some  dim  prevision  of  and  craving  for  tran- 
scendent Divine  realities  had  already  visited  the  souls  of 
men.  It  was  into  no  unspiritual  world  that  the  Christian 
religion  came,  but  a  world  rather  of  seething  hopes  and 
dreams  and  premonitory  glimpses.  These  hopes  the 
Gospel  was  to  realise.  But  it  realised  them,  we  may  believe, 
not  by  borrowing  ideas,  or  decking  itself  out  in  ancient 
symbols,  but  by  the  exhibition  of  a  fact  within  the  field  of 
history  in  which  were  more  than  fulfilled  the  inextinguish- 
able yearnings  of  the  world's  desire. 

In  conclusion,  I  cannot  deny  myself  the  pleasure  of  the 
following  quotation  from  the  Bampton  Lectures  of  1911, 
Creed  and  the  Creeds,  by  J.  H.  Skrine  :  "  To  some  of  us  who 
the  most  earnestly  contend  for  the  divinity  of  Jesus,  may 
we  not  say  that  this  Underivedness  is  the  truth  for  which 
they  are  really  contending,  when  they  champion  certain 
articles  of  our  creed  which  are  of  value  only  as  the  his- 
torical correlatives  of  that  truth,  or  as  symbols  of  it.  Thus, 
they  assert  the  Virgin  Birth  of  Jesus,  as  if  the  Divinity  of 
Christ  stood  or  fell  with  that  physical  event.  It  is  not  so 
— the  manner  of  the  Birth  can  have  efficacy  for  human  fate 
only  as  a  fleshly  accompaniment  of  the  spiritual  event,  the 
entry  into  the  human  current  of  a  force  not  derived  from 
humanity.  This  entry  is  what  we  have  to  prove.  This 
ought  we  to  do,  and  not  indeed  to  leave  the  other  undone, 
but  still  to  assure  our  hearts  that,  proven  or  found  incapable 
of  proof  or  disproof,  it  cannot  shake  our  faith  that  God  sent 
forth  His  Son;  sent  Him  forth  made  of  a  woman;  but 
His  Son.     Sometimes  now  we  fight  for  a  symbol  when  we 


534  THE    PERSON    OF   JESUS    CHT^IST 

should  fight  for  the  substance ;  as  ere  now  in  campaigns 
of  our  countrymen,  a  regiment  has  lost  a  victory  by  a 
useless  strife  to  save  the  colours.  Are  we  not  liable  to  do 
the  same — to  remember  tlie  banner,  forget  the  battle?" 
(p.  176). 


INDEX 


I.  SUBJECTS 


Acts  of  Apostles,  39-44. 

Ailani,  and  Christ,  61,  146. 

Adoi.tiauisiii,  42,  126,  22.''.. 

Alcuin,  226. 

Alexander,  bishop  of  Alexandria, 
179. 

Alexandrian  influences,  on  St.  Paul, 
69  ;  on  Hebrews,  85  ;  on  Fourth 
Gospel,  116. 

Anhoniifans,  192. 

Anselni,  324,  408. 

Antliropocentric  Cliristology,  247- 
250. 

Apocalypse  (of  John),  88-93. 

Apollinarianism,  151,  196-201. 

Apologists,  Greek,  140-4. 

Apostles'  Creed,  136-9. 

Apostolic  Fathers,  127-9. 

Arian  Controversy,  175-95. 

Aristides,  140. 

Artemon,  148. 

Athanasius,  133,  144,  152-3,  173, 
180,  183-8,  321. 

Athenagoras,  140. 

Atonement,  determines  our  concep- 
tion of  Christ,  329-33. 

Augustine,  223-5,  323,  452,  523. 

Authority,  of  Christ,  31-3,  326-9. 

Baptism,  of  Jesus,  17,  135. 
Barnabas,  126,  138. 
Basil,  153,  192-3. 
Basilides,  135. 
Bernard,  of  Clairvaux,  227. 
Binitarianism,  128. 
Brenz,  238. 

Callistus,  149. 

Calvin,  73,  244. 

Cerinthus,  129. 

Chalcedon,  Council  of,  209-15. 


Chemnitz,  238, 

Clement,  of  Alexandria,  161-4. 

Clement,  of  Rome,  126-7. 

2  Clement,  127. 

Communicatio  idiomalum,  240. 

Constantiue,  ISO. 

Constantinople,  Councils  of,  194, 
218,  220. 

Cosmic  aspect  of  Christology,  69-71 
270,  435. 

Creed,  of  Chalcedon,  212-5  ;  its  non- 
finality,  292-9. 

Creed,  of  Nicrea,  181. 

Creed,  Nicteno  -  Constantinopolitan, 
194. 

Cross,  Jesus'  anticijiation  of  the,  19. 

Cyril  of  Alexandria,  205-9. 

Development,  in  Christ's  person,  272- 
275,  491-507  ;  a  moral  necessity, 
491-6  ;  objections  to  develop- 
mental view,  496-9  ;  wider  theo- 
logical relations,  499-504  ;  relation 
to  Ivenosis,  504-5. 

Diognetus,  Epistle  to,  138. 

Dionysii,  correspondence  of  the, 
170-1. 

Discourses,  in  Fourth  Gospel,  97. 

Divinity  of  Christ,  in  St.  Paul,  65-7  ; 
in  Apocalypse,  89-90  ;  in  Fourth 
Gospel,  112-4 ;  in  sub-apostolic 
age,  126 ;  significance  for  faith, 
407-26. 

Docetism,  121,  137,  163,  298,  383-5. 

Duns  Scotus,  229. 

Dyophysites,  215-9. 

Ebionites,  124,  127. 

Eternal  Sonshiji.   of  Christ,   66,  83, 

103,  132,  184-7.  190-1, 
Eucharist,  133,  208,  381. 


535 


536 


INDEX 


Eusebius,  of  Caesarea,  180. 

Eusebius,  of  Nicomedia,  183. 

Eutyehian  Controversy,  209-11. 

Evolution,  and  Christ,  437-9. 

Exalted  Lordship  of  Christ,  in  St. 
Taul,  52-62 ;  iu  Fourth  Gospel, 
106-7  ;  .significance  of,  for  faith, 
363-82 ;  theological  interpretation 
of,  418-9. 

Faith,  Christ  Object  of,  345-53  ;  not 

merely  Subject,  353-62. 
Fatherhood  of  God,  shown  in  Jesus, 

340,  346-8. 
Forgiveness,  imparted  by  Jesus,  32  ; 

mediated  through  Jesus,  307,  359- 

362  ;  a  supernatural  reality,  357-9. 

Gnosticism,    Christology   of,    134-6, 

145. 
Godhead,   as   predicated    of    Christ, 

132,  419-23. 
Gregory,  ofNazianzus,  193,  200. 
Gregory,  of  Nyssa,  193,  201. 

Heavenly  Man,  68-9. 

Hebrews,     Christology     of,     78-87 ; 

different  from  Pauline,  86-7. 
Hegelian  Christology,  256-64. 
Henoticon,  of  Zeno,  217. 
Hernias,  126-8,  138. 
Hero,  as   description  of  Jesus,   288- 

291. 
High  Priest,  Christ  as,  81,  84. 
Hilary,  153,  174,  223. 
Hippolytus,  150. 
Historic  Christ,  in  St.   Paul,  62-5  ; 

as  standard  of  Christology,   306- 

320  ;  Herrmann's  interpretation  of, 

315-7. 
History,    and    the   Gospel,    308-12; 

and      an     absolute      Personality, 

355-7. 
HomcEans,  192. 
Homoeousians,  192-3. 
Homousia,  166,  171,  174,  181,  185- 

187,  189,  235. 
Hosius,  of  Cordova,  180-1,  191-2. 
Humanitarianism,  primitive,  123-4. 
Human   life  and  character  of  Jesus, 

in   Synoptics,  9-1 4  ;  in  St.   Paul, 

62-5  ;     in    Hebrews,     79-80 ;     in 

Fourth  Gospel,  99-100  ;  in  Luther, 

231-2  ;   significance  of,    for  faith, 

383-406. 

Ignatius,  126,  129-34,  138. 
Immanence,  and  Christ,  431-40. 


Immutability,  Divine,  272,  472-4. 
Impersonality  of  Christ's  manhood, 

206-7,  209,  385-90. 
Incarnation,  not   explained   in   NT, 

67,  120  ;  as   a  process,  273,  491- 

507  ;  Christian    idea  of,   427-444  ; 

remedial  in  piu'pose,  440-44. 
Intellectual    need    for    Christology, 

285-305. 
Intercession  of  Christ,  376-8. 
Iremeus,  125,  144-7,  169. 

Johannine      Christology,       94-121  ; 

influences  productive  of,  98-9. 
John  of  Damascus,  222. 
John  the  Baptist,  16. 
Judge,  Christ  as,  33. 
Justin  Martyr,  124,  140-4. 

Kant,  249. 

Kara  crdpKa — Kara  Tri/evfia,  127. 

Kenosis,  idea  of,  in  St.  Paul,  66-7 ; 
in  Fourth  Gospel,  115  ;  in  Irenseus, 
145;  iu  Lutheran  Christology, 
241 ;  in  Reformed  Christology, 
243  ;  in  nineteenth  century,  264- 
272,  463-66  ;  theological  interpre- 
tation of,  463-86  ;  data  of  inter- 
pretation, 469-70 ;  analogies  of, 
474-9  ;  limits  of  discussion,  482-5  ; 
Ritschl's  objection,  485. 

Kingdom  of  God,  Jesus'  conception 
of,  17  ;  present  and  future,  24. 

Kingship,  of  Christ,  379. 

Knowledge,  Jesus',  of  God,  105  ; 
limitations  of  Jesus'  secular,  397-8. 

Kdpios,  6,  9,  369,  372. 

Leo  of  Rome,  210 ;  his  Dogmatic 
Epistle,  211. 

Leontius  of  Byzantium,  217-8. 

Lessing,  308. 

Logos-conception,  iu  St.  Paul,  71  ; 
in  Hebrews,  85-6 ;  in  Fourth 
Gospel,  113,  116-20,  143;  in 
Greek  Apologists,  140-4 ;  in 
Irenaeus,  145-7 ;  in  Tertullian, 
154 ;  in  Alexandrian  theologians, 
159-70  ;  in  Paul  of  Samosata,  171- 
174  ;  in  Arius,  176-7  ;  in  Athan- 
asius,  187-8 ;  iu  Cyril,  206-9  ;  in 
Lutheran  and  Reformed  Chris- 
tologies,  240-4. 

Lucian,  176. 

Luke,  Christology  of,  5. 

Luther,  230-7,  321,  325. 

Lutheran  Church,  Christology  of, 
237-42. 


INDEX 


537 


Marcellus,  of  Ancyra,  180,  189-91. 

Marcioii,  136. 

Mark,  Chiistology  of,  5. 

Matthew,  Cliristology  of,  5. 

Mediaeval  Cliristology,  225-9. 

Melanclithoii,  237. 

Melito,  of  Sardos,  142,  149. 

Me.ssialishii>  of  Jesus,  14-9  ;  reserve 
in  His  self-avowal,  17  ;  includes 
suflering,  19,  23,  24  ;  and  Sonshiji, 
30 ;  in  St.  Paul,  53  ;  in  Fourth 
Gosjiel,  94-5 ;  in  su'i-apostolic 
age,  125. 

Messianic  dogmatic,  44. 

Metaphysics,  in  Cliristology,  302-5. 

Mithraism,  159. 

Modalism,  in  Fourth  Gospel,  112-3; 
in  Ignatius,  133. 

IModern  Radical  School,  281-4,  353- 
362. 

Monarchianism,  147-53,  166,  169, 
171-4. 

Monoyihysite  Controversy,  215-9. 

Monothelite  Controversy,  219-222. 

Mysticism,  378-9. 

Natures,   two,   doctrine    of,    155-7, 

214,  293-9. 
Neo-Platonism,  159-61. 
Nestorianisni,  201-5,  208-9. 
New  Testament   Cliristology,    types 

of,  1  ;  motives  of,  2-4. 
Nic.-ea,  Council  of,  179-83. 
Nihilianisni,  227. 
Nineteenth  Century,  Christology  of, 

247-84. 
Noetus,  149-50. 
Novatian,  157-8. 

Odes  of  Solomon,  119, 

Origen,  161,  164-70. 

ovaia,  174,  182,  186,  193,  202. 

Patripassianisni,  149-51. 

Paul  of  Samosata,  171-4,  202. 

Pauline  Christology,  49-77  ;  its  ad- 
vance on  primitive  conceptions, 
74  ;  dilfereiit  from  that  of  Hebrews, 
86-7. 

Person  of  Christ,  in  relation  to  His 
work,  321-44. 

Personality,  not  impenetrable,  338-9. 

Peter,  confession  of,  18. 

Petrine  Christology,  44-8. 

Philo,  69,  85,  116-7. 

Piety  of  Jesus,  11-2,  399. 

Plotinus,  160. 

Pneumatic  Christology,  126. 


Polycarp,  126. 

Prayer  to  Christ,  125,  366-7. 

Praxeas,  149-51. 

Pie-existence,  idea  of,  in  St.  Paul, 
66-71  ;  in  Hebrews,  83-4 ;  in 
Fourth  Gospel,  103-5 ;  view  of 
Arius,  176-8;  interpretation  of, 
445-62  ;  objections  to,  449-54  ;  as 
ideal,  not  real,  454-8  ;  religious 
value  of,  458-62. 

Presence  of  Christ,  with  disciples, 
106,  3(51-5. 

Primitive  Christian  view  of  Christ, 
39-48. 

Pythagoras,  161. 

Q  (the  Gospel  source),  Christologyof,  5. 

Reformed    Church,    Christology   of, 

242-5. 
Revelation,completc  in  Jesus,  104, 340. 
Kitscalian  Christology,  278-81. 
Robber  Synod,  410. 

Sabellianism,  144,  151-3,  190. 

Sacrifice,  of  God  in  Christ,  271. 

Salvation,  physical  idea  of,  146,  298, 
322. 

SLhleii'rmacher,  Christology  of,  250- 
256. 

Semi-Arianism,  189,  191-5. 

Sinlessness  of  Jesus,  35-8,  400-4, 
412-5. 

Socinianism,  245-6. 

Son  of  David,  23. 

Son  of  God,  as  Synoptic  title  of 
Jesus,  25-31  ;  in  St.  Paul,  65  ;  in 
Hebrews,  80-81  ;  in  Fourth  Gospel, 
102-5 ;  in  Apostolic  Fathers, 
128-9  ;  theological  interpretation 
of,  415-8. 

Son  of  man,  as  Synoptic  title  of 
Jesus,  19-25  ;  not  used  by  St. 
Paul,  54  ;  in  Fourth  Gospel,  108. 

Spirit,  reception  of  by  Jesus,  17,  124  ; 
bestowed  by  exalted  Lord,  42  ;  as 
part  of  Christ's  being,  64,  127  ;  cor- 
related with  Christ,  45,  57-8,  128  ; 
mediated  through  Christ,  373-6. 

Sub-apostolic  age,  Christology  of, 
122-7. 

Subconsciousness,  487-90. 

Subordination,  of  the  Son,  in  St. 
Paul,  71-4  ;  in  Hebrews,  85  ;  in 
the  Apocalypse,  92 ;  in  Fourth 
Gospel,  101,  114-5  ;  in  Tertullian, 
154  ;  in  Origen,  166  ;  in  Atliau- 
asius,  188  ;  cf.  also,  464. 


538 


INDEX 


Synoptics,  Christology  of,  1,  5-35. 
cruT-rip,  75-6. 

Temptation  of  Jesus,  12,  401-3. 

Tertullian,  125,  148,  153-8. 

Theocentric  Christology,  247-50. 

Tlieodore,  of  Mopsuestia,  201-2. 

Theodotus,  148. 

Theophilus,  140. 

Thomas  Aquinas,  228,  523. 

Trinity,  doctrine  of,  153,  193-4,  508- 
26  ;  purely  experimental  in  Scrip- 
ture, 509  ;  economic  theory,  512- 
515  ;  immanent  theory,  515-26. 

Tubingen  and  Giesseu  Controversy, 
239. 


Union  with  Christ,  in  St.  Paul,  56, 
334-5  ;  in  Fourth  Gospel,  110-2, 
336-7  ;  determines  our  conception 
of  His  person,  333-40. 

Unitarianism,  173,  281-4,  340. 

Universality  of  Christ,  391-3. 

virbaraffii,  174,  182,  186,  193,  202, 
•207,  524. 

Valentinus,  134. 
Victor,  bishop,  148. 
Virgin-birth,  138-9,  253,  387,  527- 
34. 

Westminster  Confession,  293. 


II.  AUTHORS 


Abbott,  336. 
Allen,  5. 

Baur,  22,  50,  68,  85,  128,  221. 

Bensow,  476. 

Bergson,  291. 

Bethune-Baker,  146,  147,  154,  163, 

203,  204,  269. 
Biedermann,  262. 
Bigg,  162,  165-6. 
Bonwetsch,  201,  207,  213. 
Bousset,  16,  21-2,  34,  88,  357. 
Bovon,  370. 
Bradley,  A.  C,  328. 
Bradley,  F.  H.,  38. 
Browning,  339,  468. 
Bruce,  79,  82,  245,  267,  277. 
Briickner,  51. 
Burkitt,  20,  21,  99,  384. 
Burton,  97,  116. 

Caird,  E.,  263. 
Caird,  J.,  199,  439. 
Cairns,  351. 
Caspari,  136. 
Coleridge,  275. 

Dale,  312,  328,  381,  411. 

Dalman,  18,  22. 

D'Arcy,  464. 

Davidson,  82. 

Deissmann,  62,  67. 

Denney,  4,  17,  27,  28,  41,    46,    64, 

93,  286,  329,  415,  509,  531. 
Dick  Fleming,  246. 
Dorner,  213,  218,  267,272-5,  440, 

497. 


Dniseke,  201. 
Drescher,  62. 
Driver,  22. 
Drummond,  99,  340. 
Du  Bose,  387. 

Dykes,  200,  202,  208,  215,  222,  234, 
239. 

Edgehill,  341. 
Ewald,  108. 

Fairbairn,  61,  81,  258,  337,  433. 

Faut,  261,  420. 

Feine,  23,  34,  43,  63. 

Findlay,  342. 

Forrest,  35,  265,  271,  318,  435,  464. 

Forsyth,  302,  465,  473,  475,  502. 

Foster,  189. 

Frommel,  253,  395. 

Garvie,  369,  446,  464. 
Gess,  267. 

Glover,  144,  163,  468. 
Godet,  268. 
Goguel,  28. 
Goltz,  von  der,  133. 
Gray,  529. 
Green,  393. 
Gunkel,  51. 

Gwatkin,   131,   174,    180,  184,  189, 
195. 

Haering,  38,  248,  322,  345,  419,  462. 
Hahn,  137,  182,  192,  194,  197,  198, 
209,  210,  212. 


INDKX 


539 


Harnack,  A.,  2,  6,  9,  27,  20,  75,  116, 
126,  135,  141,  148,  157,  164,  169, 
172,  179,  194,  '209,  218,  234,  269, 
347,  419,  449,  510,  529. 

Harnack,  Th.,  269. 

Haupt,  97. 

Headlani,  61. 

Heitmiiller,  354. 

Herrmann,  34,  232,  236,  315,  352, 
362,  367,  422,  425,  458. 

Hogg,  375,  377. 

Holsten,  50. 

Holtzmann,  18,  85,  122. 

Illingworth,  188. 
Irving,  276-8. 

James,  311. 
Jiilicher,  62,  68. 

Kaftan,  24,  50,  286. 

Kahler,  245,  299,  313,  414,  494,  499. 

Kattenbusch,  136. 

Kennedy,  19,  67. 

KiiTi,  2/2,  434,  456. 

Knox,  519. 

Kriiger,  215. 

Kuhl,  27. 

Lagarde,  15. 

Lightfoot,  66,  69,  130. 

Lindsay,  189,  235. 

Lofthouse,  339. 

Loots,  72,  124,  128,   136,  144,  155, 

166,  187,  194,  204,  208,  211,  215, 

226,  267. 
Liitgert,  115. 

Macgregor,  425. 

i^Iartineau,  340,  520. 

Mason,  398. 

Mathews,  40,  95. 

Maurice,  276. 

McGiffert,  137. 

McLeod  Campbell,  275. 

Moberly,    60,   189,    332,    388,    480, 

513. 
Moffatt,  52,  58,  76,  92,  528. 
Mozley,  367,  472,  498. 
Muirhead,  9,  24. 
Mulert,  254. 

Nettleship,  330,  525. 
Xiebergall,  317. 

Olschewski,  53,  57,  59. 

Orr,  530. 

Ottley,  130,  146,  205. 


Peake,  70. 
Purclias,  96,  115. 

Kainy,  144,  149,  185. 

Ramsay,  430. 

Redepenning,  162. 

Rcischle,  75. 

Renan,  102. 

Ren.lel  Harris,  119. 

R.?ville,  .353,  517. 

Riehm,  83. 

Ritschl,  250,  278-81,  350,  378,  450. 

Robertson,  184. 

Sanday,  22,    61,  98,  130,  144,  189, 

399,  487-90,  513,  524. 
Schaeder,  459,  511. 
Scheel,   189,  224,  227. 
Scblatter,  118,  290. 
Schmiedel,  59,  354. 
Schultz,  177,  423. 
Scott,  E.  F.,  8,  24,  95,  99,  109,  336, 

374. 
Scott,  C.  A.,  91. 
Seeberg,  128,  132,  139,  171,  173,  184, 

222. 
Simpson,  308,  443. 
Skrine,  252.  533. 
Strauss,  260,  338,  438. 
Strong,  386. 
Swete,  129,  138. 

Temple,  501. 

Thieme,  367,  399,  424. 

Thomasius,  153,  266. 

Thompson,  474. 

Titius,  29,  72,  106,  110,  423. 

Troeltsch,  357. 

Tymms,  344. 

Ullmann,  277. 

Volkmar,  15. 

Von  Soden,  13,  15,  392. 

Walker,  464. 

Wallace,  258. 

Wartield,  151. 

Weinel,  21,  50,  59,  65,  359. 

Weiss,  B.,  45,  83,  92. 

Weiss,  J.,  5,  40,  52,  56,  65,  99,  105, 

367,  530. 
Weizsiicker,  72.  99. 
Wellhausen,  22,  34. 
Weudland,  J.,  357. 
Wendland,  P.,  76. 
Wendt,  364,  452. 


540 


INDEX 


Westcott,  119,  440. 
Weston,  465,  484,  493. 
Wobbeimiu,  316. 


Wrede,  15,  51. 

Zahn,  42,  125,  132,  136. 


III.  EEFERENCES 


Genesis,  1\  104, 

2  Samuel,  7""",  25. 

Psalms,  2,  16,  25  ;  7»,  90  ;  33^  117  ; 
107-",  117  ;  3  471^  117. 

Proverbs,  8^-,  154,  176. 

Isaiah,  S'^,  47  ;  53,  19,  23,  43  ;  55", 
117  ;  60'9,  91. 

Jeremiah,  23-9,  117. 

Matthew,  7^1,  26;  10^^26;  ll^^-, 
17;  IV^  20;  11^7,  26  ff.,  96.  106, 
415;  ll-^  12;  1250,  26;  W\  23;  16'-^ 
36  ;  18-»,  110  ;  26^^  25  ;  27^",  25. 

Mark,  1',  5  ;  2'",  20,  23,  32  ;  3", 
25  ;  65,  5,  14  ;  S^i,  18  ;  8",  26  ; 
8^^  34  ;  lO's,  37  ;  10=*^  33  ;  IS^-. 
13,  26,  29,  397  ;  1539,  25. 

Luke,  2*"-^-,  26  ;  2^\  10  ;  4-^  18  ; 
1426,  326;  2218  f-,  12;  22^*,  20; 
2419,  43  ;  24-S  15. 

John,  1,  18  ;  l^,  104  ;  V^,  83  ;  V'^^ 
115  ff.;  1",  107  ;  l'^^  103  f.  ;  l^^, 
120  ;  3l^  108  ;  3",  108  ;  3i«,  103  ; 
32^  110;  3^5^  95;  4'^  110;  5'*, 
103;  519,  100;  5"'-29,  103,  114, 
520,  95 ;  526,  102 ;  5^",  99 ;  5^8, 
111  ;  6-^  108  ;  6^1,  110  ;  6^3,  108  ; 
662,  108  ;  669,  102  ;  7^1,  95  ;  8^8,  100  ; 
8-9, 100  ;  8^8,  104  ;  8^^,  35  ;  S's,  104  ; 
10",  100;  lO-'",  112;  10^3,  103; 
103«,  100,  114;  1038,  112;  ll^i, 
100  ;  12-3,  108  ;  1223.24^  120  ;  1227, 
99,  120 ;  123^,  108 ;  12«,  112  ; 
133,  106;  1331,  108,  120;  149, 
112;  14'»,  104;  H^^S  42;  142", 
111  ;  1426,  98  ;  15^,  110 ;  15", 
101;  152«,  98;  16i3,  98;  1623, 
72;  1627,  12,  111  ;  173,  101  ; 
17*- ^  107;  175,  101  ;  1721,  111  ; 
1723,  110;  173^  104;  20^3,  107; 
2028,  96  ;  2031,  94  ;  21,  96. 

Acts,  V,  13;  P^  42;  222,  39;  223, 
41  ;  22^  46  ;  232,  41  .  238^  40  ;  238, 
43;  3'3,  43;  S'*,  43  ;  3' 9- 20,  44  ; 
412,  43  ;  427,  43  ;  7'6,  20,  43  ;  7^9, 
42,  125  ;  7««,  42  ;  1036,  41  .  iqss^ 
40;  10",  41  ;  19«,  43. 

Romans,  13-  *,  40,  47,  68,  64-5,  127  ; 


42^'-,  53;  5,  68;  83,  63,  66;  8'^^-. 

55  ;  832,  65,  71  ;  95,  49,  72  ;  12-5, 

56  ;  149,  60  ;  14'*,  56  ;  14'7,  61. 

1  Corinthians,  12,  125,  366  ;  19,  65  ; 
22,  53  ;  323,  71,  73  ;  lOS  66,  447  ; 
1031  ff-,   37.    113^   71  .    153  ff.^   48; 

1528,  72  ;  15"-9,  68,  87  ;  15^^^  61. 

2  Corinthians,  3",  59,  128  ;  4^,  54  ; 
4I",  56  ;  5\  57  ;  5^9,  441  ;  8^,  69  ; 
89,  66  ;  122,  20;  128,  42^  125; 
131^  59. 

Galatians,  1",  62 ;  li^,  54  ;  22",  55, 

65  ;  4-',  66,  71,  74  ;  522,  57. 
Ephesians,  121,  55  ;  2i8,  509. 
Piiilippians,  2i,  56  ;  25-7,  ge,  75,  83, 

172  ;  27-8,  37  .  29,  60,  71. 
Colossians,  li3,  65  ;  l'^,  65,  83  ;  V'^'^-, 

69;  1'6,  72,  118  ;  II8,  57  ;  1'9,  71, 

74  ;  29,  72  ;  2i5,  61. 

1  Thessalonians,  416,  56. 

2  Thessalonians,  I12,  49. 
Titus,  613,  139. 

Hebrews,  li'^  78,  83  ;  I2,  82,  85  ;  l3, 
81,  83;  1*,  84  ;  1^,  85  ;  1^,  85  ; 
18,  81  ;  1'3,  85;  23,  79  ;  29,  81  ; 
213,  79  .    2"-i6,    81  ;   21^  441  ;   32, 

79  ;  3",  87  ;  4»    84  ;  41^,  37  ;  5*, 

81,  87  ;  57,    79  ;  58,    37,   79  ;   59, 

80  ;  6^  87  ;  716,  84  ;  721,  79  ;  7^3, 

78  ;  725,  78,  84  ;  727,   82  ;  8i,  80  ; 

82,  80  ;  86,  78  ;  9'2,  82  ;  9",  84  ; 
915,  78  ;  92^  84  ;  928,  84  ;  105-7,  80  ; 
122,  79  .  123^  79  ;   12-'^,  78  ;    I312, 

79  ;  1320,  85. 

1  Peter,  V,  46  ;  P,  47  ;  1",  45  ;  l^', 

45;  221,  37;3'3,  47;  318,  46  ;  3i9,  46; 

322,  47;  46,  46  ;  41',  47;  5'i,  47. 
1    John,    17,   121  ;    22'-23,    384 ;    2=3, 

121  ;     41-3,    384  ;    42-3,    121  ;    4i», 

441  ;  415,  384  ;  56,  121  ;  56-8,  384  ; 

520,  121. 
Revelation,  I*-  6,  90  ;  is,  93  ;  li3,  89  ; 

118,  90  .  227,   90  ;    35,   90  ;  3",   90  ; 

55,  88;  5'3,  42,  91  ;  527 ff-,  88;  7'", 

91  ;  71'*-,  91  ;  141*,  89  ;  19i9,  90  ; 

1913,    90  ;    216,    90  ;    2122-  23^    91  ; 

2213,  90  ;  2216,  88  ;  222o,  125. 


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Apologetics;    or,    Christianity    Defensively    Stated. 

By  Alex.\xder  B.\lm.\in  Bruce,  D.D. 

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stimulating  to  faith.  .  .  .  Without  commenting  further,  we  repeat  that 
this  volume  is  the  ablest,  most  scholarly,  most  advanced,  and  sharpest 
defence  of  Christianity  that  has  ever  been  WTitten.  No  theological 
library  should  be  without  it." — Zian's  Herald. 

Crown  8vo.     $2.50  net. 

Old  Testament  History,    by  henrv  preserved  smith,  d  d. 

"  Prof.  Smith  has,  by  his  comprehensive  and  vitalized  history,  laid  all  who 
ewe  for  the  Old  Testament  under  great  obligations." — The  Independent. 

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The  Theology  of  the  New  Testament.    By  george  b. 

Stevens,  D.D.,  LL.D. 

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and  statement."— r/z€  Congregationalist.  Crown  8vo.     $2.50  net. 

History  of   Christian    Doctrine.    By  george  p.  fisher, 

D.D.,  LL.D. 

"  It  is  only  just  to  say  that  Dr.  Fisher  has  produced  the  best  History 
of  Doctrine  that  we  have  in  English." — The  New  York  Evangelist. 

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The    Christian    Pastor    and   the    Working   Church. 

By  Washington  Gladden,  D.D.,  LL.D. 

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finds  in  it  a  multitude  of  practical  suggestions  for  the  development  of 
the  spiritual  and  working  life  of  the  Church,  and  the  answer  to  many 
problems  that  are  a  constant  perplexity  to  the  faithful  minister." 

— The  Christian  Intelligencer. 
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Christian     Institutions.        By    Alexander  v.  B.  Allen,  d.d. 

"  Professor  Allen's  Christian  Institutions  may  be  regarded  as  the  most 
important  permanent  contribution  which  the  Protestant  Episcopal 
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thought." — TJie  American  Journal  of  Theology. 

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The  Theology  of  the  Old  Testament.    By  a.  b.  Davidson, 

D.D.,  LL.D.,  D.Litt. 

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and  studied  this  most  admirable  and  useful  book.  Every  really  useful 
question  relating  to  man  —  his  nature,  his  fall,  and  his  redemption, 
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The  Christian  Doctrine  of  Salvation.    By  george  b. 

Stevens,  D.D.,  LL.D. 

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exert  wide  and  helpful  influence  in  settling  the  minds  of  men.  He  has 
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interpreting  his  own  mission." — Congregationalist  and  Christian  World. 

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The  Ancient  Catholic  Church.  By  Robert  raiijey,  d.d.,  ll.d. 

"As  a  comprehensive  work  on  the  formative  stage  of  the  Church's  ex- 
perience the  volume  will  easily  find  its  place  in  the  front  rank  among 
books  on  the  subject  composed  in  the  English  language." — The  Interior. 

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The  Reformation  in  Germany.    By  thomas  m.  Lindsay, 

M.A.,  D.D. 

"The  arrangement  of  the  book  is  most  excellent,  and  while  it  is  a 
worthy  and  scholarly  account  it  is  so  arranged  that  for  the  student  of 
the  Reformation  it  is  almost  encyclopaedic  in  its  convenience  and  con- 
ciseness. It  is  a  book  no  library,  public  or  private,  can  really  be 
without." — Record  0/  Christian  Work. 

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The  Reformation  in  Lands  Beyond  Germany.  ByTnoMAs 

^L  LiXDSAY,  D.D. 

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— The  Congregalionalist. 

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Canon  and  Text  of  the  New  Testament.    By  Caspar  renb 

Gregory,  D.D.,  LL.D. 

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matter  in  hand  is  admirable.  From  first  to  last,  the  purpose  of  the 
author  is  not  to  show  upon  how  slight  basis  our  confidence  in  the  can- 
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foundation  our  confidence  rests." — Journal  and  Messenger. 

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The  Greek  and  Eastern  Churches.    By  Walter  f.  adeney, 

M.A.,  D.D. 

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not  know  anything  in  English  which  covers  the  same  ground  and 
am  sure  Dr.  Adeney  has  put  us  all  in  his  debt  by  his  scholarly,  well- 
balanced  and  judicious  treatment."— Pro/".  William  Adams  Broum. 

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The  Christian  Doctrine  of  God.    By  William  N.  Clarke,  d.d. 

"  The  book  is  a  treasury  of  learning,  and  its  fairness  in  dealing  with 
the  matter  in  hand  is  admirable.  From  first  to  last,  the  purpose  of  the 
author  is  not  to  show  upon  how  slight  basis  our  confidence  in  the 
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a  foundation  our  confidence  rests." — Journal  and  Messenger. 

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An  Introduction  to  the  Literature  of  the  New  Testa- 

ment.     By  James  Moffatt,  B.D.,  D.D. 

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lems at  issue,  it  will  bear  comparison  with  Driver's  companion  volume 
on  the  literature  of  the  Old  Testament,  than  which  no  higher  praise 
can  be  given.  .  .  .  The  student  will  find  in  Dr.  Moffatt 's  volume  the 
most  complete  presentation  as  yet  attempted  by  any  scholar  of  all  that 
modern  critical  scholarship  has  done  for  the  literature  of  the  New 
Testament." — Scotsman. 

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The  Doctrine  of  the  Person  of  Jesus  Christ.    By  h.  r. 

Mackintosh,   Ph.D.,   Professor  of   Systematic  Theology,  New  College, 

Edinburgh. 

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The  International 

Critical  Commentary 

On  the  Holy  Scriptures  of  the  Old  and 
New  Testaments 


EDITORS'    PREFACE 


THERE  are  now  before  the  public  many  Commentaries, 
written  by  British  and  American  divines,  of  a  popular 
or  homiletical  character.  The  Cambridge  Bible  for 
Schools,  the  Handbooks  for  Bible  Classes  and  Private  Students, 
The  Speaker's  Comme?itary,  The  Popular  Commentary  (Schaf!), 
The  Expositor's  Bible,  and  other  similar  series,  have  their 
special  place  and  importance.  But  they  do  not  enter  into  the 
field  of  Critical  Biblical  scholarship  occupied  by  such  series  of 
Commentaries  as  the  Kurzgefasstes  exegetisches  Handbuch  zum 
A.  T  ;  De  Wette's  Ktirzgefasstes  exegetisches  Handbuch  zum 
N.  T.  ;  Meyer's  Kritisch-exegetischer  Kommentar ;  Keil  and 
Delitzsch's  Biblischer  Commentar  iiber  das  A.  T. ;  Lange's 
Theologisch-homiletisches  Bibelwerk  ;  Nowack's  Ha?idkommentar 
zum  A.  T.  ;  Holtzmann's  Handkommentar  zum  N.  T.  Several 
of  these  have  been  translated,  edited,  and  in  some  cases  enlarged 
'and  adapted,  for  the  English-speaking  public;  others  are  in 
process  of  translation.  But  no  corresponding  series  by  British 
or  American  divines  has  hitherto  been  produced.  The  way  has 
been  prepared  by  special  Commentaries  by  Cheyne,  EUicott, 
Kalisch,  Lightfoot,  Perowne,  Westcott,  and  others;  and  the 
time  has  come,  in  the  judgment  of  the  projectors  of  this  enter- 
prise, when  it  is  practicable  to  combine  British  and  American 
scholars  in  the  production  of  a  critical,  comprehensive 
Commentary  that  will  be  abreast  of  modern  biblical  scholarship, 
Sind  in  a  measxire  lead  its  van. 


The  International  Critical  Commentary 


Messrs.  Charles  Scribner's  Sons  of  New  York,  and  Messrs. 
T.  &  T.  Clark  of  Edinburgh,  propose  to  publish  such  a  series 
of  Commentaries  on  the  Old  and  New  Testaments,  under  the 
editorship  of  Prof.  C.  A.  Briggs,  D.D.,  D.Litt.,  in  America,  and 
of  Prof.  S.  R.  Driver,  D.D.,  D.Litt.,  for  the  Old  Testament,  and 
the  Rev.  ALFRED  Plummer,  D.D.,  for  the  New  Testament,  in 
Great  Britain. 

The  Commentaries  will  be  international  and  inter-confessional, 
and  will  be  free  from  polemical  and  ecclesiastical  bias.  They 
will  be  based  upon  a  thorough  critical  study  of  the  original  texts 
of  the  Bible,  and  upon  critical  methods  of  interpretation.  They 
are  designed  chiefly  for  students  and  clergymen,  and  will  be 
written  in  a  compact  style.  Each  book  will  be  preceded  by  an 
Introduction,  stating  the  results  of  criticism  upon  it,  and  discuss- 
ing impartially  the  questions  still  remaining  open.  The  details 
of  criticism  will  appear  in  their  proper  place  in  the  body  of  the 
Commentary.  Each  section  of  the  Text  will  be  introduced 
with  a  paraphrase,  or  summary  of  contents.  Technical  details 
of  textual  and  philological  criticism  will,  as  a  rule,  be  kept 
distinct  from  matter  of  a  more  general  character  ;  and  in  the 
Old  Testament  the  exegetical  notes  will  be  arranged,  as  far  as 
possible,  so  as  to  be  serviceable  to  students  not  acquainted  with 
Hebrew.  The  History  of  Interpretation  of  the  Books  will  be 
dealt  with,  when  necessary,  in  the  Introductions,  with  critical 
notices  of  the  most  important  literature  of  the  subject.  Historical 
and  Archaeological  questions,  as  well  as  questions  of  Biblical 
Theology,  are  included  in  the  plan  of  the  Commentaries,  but 
not  Practical  or  Homiletical  Exegesis.  The  Volumes  will  con- 
stitute a  uniform  series. 


The  International  Critical  Commentary 


ARRANGEMENT   OF  VOLUMES   AND   AUTHORS 
THE  OLD  TESTAMENT 

GENESIS  The  Rev.  JOHN  Skixner,  D.D.,  Principal  and  Professor  of 
Old  Testament  Language  and  Literature,  College  of  Presbyterian  Church 
of  England,  Cambridge,  England.  [^'ow  Ready. 

EXODUS.  The  Rev.  A.  R.  S.  KENNEDY,  D.D.,  Professor  of  Hebrew, 
University  of  Edinburgh. 

LEVITICUS.    T.  F.  Stenning,  M.A.,  Fellow  of  Wadham  College,  Oxford. 

NUMBERS.  The  Rev.  G.  Buchanan  Gray,  D.D.,  Professor  of  Hebrew, 
Mansfield  College,  Oxford.  l-'^''^^  Ready. 

DEUTERONOMY.  The  Rev.  S.  R.  Driver,  D.D.,  D.Litt.,  Regius  Pro- 
fessor of  Hebrew,  O.xford.  [^'"^  Ready. 

JOSHUA.  The  Rev.  George  Adam  Smith,  D.D.,  LL.D.,  Principal  of  the 
University  of  Aberdeen. 

JUDGES.  The  Rev.  George  Moore,  D.D.,  LL.D.,  Professor  of  Theol- 
og}%  Harvard  University,  Cambridge,  Mass.  \.^<rjj  Ready. 

SAMUEL.  The  Rev.  H.  P.  Smith,  D.D.,  Professor  of  Old  Testament 
Literature  and  History  of  Religion,  Meadville,  Pa.  \N(rjj  Ready. 

KINGS.  The  Rev.  Fean'CIS  Brown,  D.D.,  D.Litt.,  LL.D.,  President 
and  Professor  of  Hebrew  and  Cognate  Languages,  Union  Theological 
Seminary,  New  York  City. 

CHRONICLES.  The  Rev.  Edw.ard  L.  Cvrtis,  D.D.,  Professor  of 
Hebrew,  Yale  University,  New  Haven,  Conn.  {Now  Ready. 

EZRA  AND  NEHEMIAH.  The  Rev.  L.  W.  Batten,  Ph.D.,  D.D.,  Pro- 
fessor of  Old  Testament  Literature,  General  Theological  Seminary,  New 
York  City. 

PSALMS.  The  Rev.  Chas.  A.  Briggs,  D.D.,  D.Litt.,  Gradua'e  Fro- 
fessor  of  Theological  Encycloptedia  and  Symbolics,  Union  Theological 
Seminary,  New  York.  '  {z  vols.    No%v  Ready 

PROVERBS.  The  Rev.  C.  H.  Toy,  D.D.,  LL.D.,  Professor  of  Hebrew, 
Harvard  University,  Cambridge,  Mass.  \Now  Ready. 

JOB.  The  Rev.  S.  R.  Driver,  D.D.,  D.Li'-.t..  Regius  Professor  of  He- 
brew, Oxford. 


The  Ixterxatioxal  Critical  Commentary 


ISAIAH.  Chaps.  I-XXVII.  The  Rev.  G.  Buchanan  Gray,  D.D.,  Pro- 
fessor of  Hebrew,  IMansfield  College,  Oxford.  [Now  Ready. 

ISAIAH.  Chaps.  XXVni-XXXIX.  The  Rev.  G.  Buchanan  Gray,  D.D. 
Chaps.  LX-LXVI.  The  Rev.  A.  S.  Peake,  M.A.,  D.D.,  Dean  of  the  Theo- 
logical Faculty  of  the  Victoria  University  and  Professor  of  Biblical  Exegesis 
in  the  University  of  ISIanchester,  England. 

JEREMIAH.  The  Rev,  A.  F.  Kirkpatrick,  D.D.,  Dean  of  Ely,  sometime 
Regius  Professor  of  Hebrew,  Cambridge,  England. 

EZEKIEL.  The  Rev.  G.  A.  Cooke,  M.A.,  Oriel  Professor  of  the  Interpre- 
tation of  Holy  Scripture,  University  of  Oxford,  and  the  Rev.  Charles  F. 
BuRNEY,  D.Litt.,  Fellow  and  Lecturer  in  Hebrew,  St.  John's  College, 
Oxford. 

DANIEL.  The  Rev.  John  P.  Peters,  Ph.D.,  D.D.,  sometime  Professor 
of  Hebrew,  P.  E.  Divinity  School,  Philadelphia,  now  Rector  of  St.  Michael's 
Church,  New  York  City. 

AMOS  AND  HOSEA.  W.  R.  Harper,  Ph.D.,  LL.D.,  sometime  President 
of  the  University  of  Chicago,  Illinois.  [N^oiv  Ready. 

MICAH,  ZEPHANIAH,   NAHUM,    HABAKKUK,    OBADIAH    AND  JOEL. 

Prof.  John  M.  P.  Smith,  University  of  Chicago;  W.  Hayes  Ward,  D.D., 
LL.D.,  Editor  of  The  Independent,  New  York;  Prof.  Julius  A.  Bewer, 
Union  Theological  Seminary,  New  York.  [Now  Ready. 

HAGGAI,  ZECHARIAH,  MALACH  I  AND  JONAH.  Prof.  H.  G.  MITCHELL, 
D.D.;  Prof.  John  M.  P.  Smith,  Ph.D.,  and  Prof.  J.  A.  Bewer,  Ph.D. 

[Now  Ready. 

ESTHER.  The  Rev.  L.  B.  Paton,  Ph.D.,  Professor  of  Hebrew,  Hart- 
ford Theological  Seminary.  [Now  Ready. 

ECCLESIASTES.  Prof.  George  A.  Barton,  Ph.D.,  Professor  of  Bibli- 
cal Literature,  Bryn  Mawr  College,  Pa.  [N'otv  Ready. 

RUTH.   SONG  OF  SONGS  AND  LAMENTATIONS.     Rev.CHARLESA. 

Briggs,  D.D.,  D.Litt.,  Graduate  Professor  of  Theological  Encyclopaedia 
and  Symbolics,  Union  Theological  Seminary,  New  York. 


THE   NEW   TESTAMENT 

ST.  MATTHEW.    The  Rev.  WiLLOUGHBY  C.  Allen,  M.A.,   Fellow  and 
Lecturer  in  Theology  and  Hebrew,  Exeter  College,  Oxford.       [Now  Ready. 

ST.    MARK.    Rev.  E.  P.  Gould,  D.D.,  sometime  Professor  of  New  Testa- 
ment Literature,   P.  E.  Divinity  School,   Philadelphia.  [Now  Ready. 

ST.  LUKE.    The    Rev.    ALFRED    Plummer,    D.D.,    sometime   Master  of 
University  College,  Durham.  [A/Lw  Ready. 


The  International  Critical  Commentary 


ST.  JOHN.  The  Right  Rev.  John  Henry  Bernard,  D.D.,  Bishop  of 
Ossory,  Ireland. 

HARMONY  OF  THE  GOSPELS.  The  Rev.  WiLLlAM  Saxday,  D.D., 
LL.D.,  Lady  Margaret  Professor  of  Divinity,  Oxford,  and  the  Rev.  Wil- 
LOUGHBY  C.  .\llen,  M.A.,  Fellow  and  Lecturer  in  Divinity  and  Hebrew, 
Exeter  College,  Oxford. 

ACTS.  The  Rev.  C.  H.  Turner,  D.D.,  Fellow  of  Magdalen  College, 
Oxford,  and  the  Rev.  H.  X.  Bate,  M.A.,  Examining  Chaplain  to  the 
Bishop  of  London. 

ROMANS.  The  Rev.  William  Sanday,  D.D.,  LL.D.,  Lady  Margaret 
Professor  of  Divinity  and  Canon  of  Christ  Church,  Oxford,  and  the  Rev. 
A.  C.  He.adlam,  M.A.,  D.D.,  Principal  of  King's  College,  London. 

[Now  Ready. 

I.  CORINTHIANS.  The  Right  Rev.  Arch  Robertson,  D.D.,  LL.D., 
Lord  Bishop  of  Exeter,  and  Rev.  Alfred  Plummer,  D.D.,  late  Master  of 
University  College,  Durham.  [Now  Ready. 

II.  CORINTHIANS.  The  Rev.  Dawson  Walker,  D.D.,  Theological  Tutor 
in  the  University  of  Durham. 

GALATIANS.  The  Rev.  Ernest  D.  Burton,  D.D.,  Professor  of  New 
Testament  Literature,  University  of  Chicago. 

EPHESIANS  AND  COLOSSIANS.  The  Rev.  T.  K.  .\bbott,  B.D., 
D.Litt.,  sometime  Professor  of  Biblical  Greek,  Trinity  College,  Dublin, 
now  Librarian  of  the  same.  [Now  Ready. 

PHILIPPIANS  AND  PHILEMON.  The  Rev.  Marvin  R  Vincent, 
D.D.,  Professor  of  Biblical  Literature,  Union  Theological  Seminary,  New 
York  City.  [Now  Ready. 

THESSALONIANS.  The  Rev.  James  E.  Frame,  M.A.,  Professor  of 
Biblical  Theology,  Union  Theological  Seminary,  New  York  City. 

[Now  Ready. 
THE  PASTORAL  EPISTLES.  The  Rev.  Walter  Lock,  D.D.,  Warden 
of  Keble  College  and  Professor  of  Exegesis,  O.xford. 

HEBREWS.  The  Rev.  James  Moffatt,  D.D.,  Minister  United  Free 
Church,  Broughty  Ferry,  Scotland. 

ST.  JAMES.  The  Rev.  James  H.  Ropes,  D.D.,  Bussey  Professor  of  New 
Testament  Criticism  in  Harvard  University. 

PETER  AND  JUDE.  The  Rev.  CHARLES  Bigg,  D.D.,  sometime  Reo^'us 
Professor  of  Ecclesiastical  History  and  Canon  of  Christ  Church,  Oxford. 

[^\'(^<.'  JieaJy. 

THE  EPISTLES  OF  ST.  JOHN,  The  Rev.  E.  \.  Brooke,  B.D.,  Fellow 
and  Diviuity  Lecturer  in  King's  College,  Cambridge.  [Now  Ready. 

REVELATION.  The  Rev.  Robert  H.  Charles,  M.A.,  D.D.,  sumetime 
Professor  of  Biblical  Greek  in  tiie  University  of  Dublin. 


The 
International  Critical  Commentary 

VOLUMES  NOW  READY 

Genesis.  By  the  Rev.  John  Skinner,  D.D.,  Principal  and  Professor  of 
Old  Testament  Language  and  Literature,  College  of  Presbyterian  Church 
of  England,  Cambridge,  England. 

"Exact  scholarship,  a  scientific  temper  of  mind,  and  the  reverence  of 
a  believer  in  Divine  revelation  combine  to  render  Principal  Skinner 
an  ideal  commentator  on  the  Book  of  Genesis.  The  work  before  us 
will  unquestionably  take  its  place  in  the  very  front  rank  of  modern  Old 
Testament  commentaries.  We  can  award  it  no  higher  praise  than  to 
say  that  it  need  not  shrink  from  comparison  with  what  has  hitherto 
been  facile  princeps  in  the  series  to  which  it  belongs — Driver's  Deu- 
teronomy."— Rev.  J.  A.  Selbie,  D.D.,  in  The  Expository  Times. 

Crown  8vo.     $3.00  net. 

Numbers.     By  the  Rev.  G.  Buchanan  Gray,  D.D.,  Professor  of  Hebrew, 

Mansfield  College,  Oxford. 

"Most' Bible  readers  have  the  impression  that  'Numbers'  is  a  dull 
book  only  relieved  by  the  brilliancy  of  the  Balaam  chapters  and  some 
snatches  of  old  Hebrew  songs,  but,  as  Prof.  Gray  shows  with  admirable 
skill  and  insight,  its  historical  and  religious  value  is  not  that  which  lies 
on  the  surface.  Prof.  Gray's  commentary  is  distinguished  by  fine 
scholarship  and  sanity  of  Judgment;  it  is  impossible  to  commend  it  too 
warmly." — Saturday  Review  (London). 

Crown  8vo.    $3.00  net. 

Deuteronomy.  By  the  Rev.  S.  R.  Driver,  D.D.,  D.Litt.,  Regius 
Professor  of  Hebrew,  and  Canon  of  Christ  Church,  Oxford. 

"It  is  a  pleasure  to  see  at  last  a  really  critical  Old  Testament  com- 
mentary in  English  upon  a  portion  of  the  Pentateuch,  and  especially 
one  of  such  merit.  This  I  find  superior  to  any  other  commentary  in 
any  language  upon  Deuteronomy." 

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Madsen,  Ph.D. 

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both  massive  and  minute,  by  any  volume  of  the  International  Series,  to 
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University  of  Chicago. 

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volume,  either  upon  some  passage  of  the  two  prophets  treated,  or  upon 
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Ward,  D.D.,  LL.D.,  Editor  of  The  Independent,  New  York;  Prof.  Julius 
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lege, Dublin. 

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.    discussions  of  the  contents  of  these  Epistles.  "—Dr.  George  P.  Fisher. 

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College;  Prof.  John  M.  P.  Smith,  Ph.D.,  University  of  Chicago,  and 
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14  DAY  USE 

I  RETURN  TO  DESK  FROM  WHICH  BORROWED 

LOAN  DEPT. 

This  book  is  due  on  the  last  date  stamped  below, 
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